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Event

Kipton train disaster

A steam locomotive numbered 50 emits thick smoke as it collides with another train at night, with three figures standing on the tracks, illuminated by the fiery glow of the collision.

Collision between two trains of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway near Kipton, Ohio, on April 19, 1891. Nine people died. A station agent's watch had stopped for four minutes and resumed without him noticing. The line's response, hiring jeweller Webb C. Ball to write specifications for an inspected, certified pocket watch, produced the railroad chronometer standard that governed American railway timekeeping for the next half-century.

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