On this date 116 years ago, the U.S. Congress passed the first piece of railway safety legislation in the nation's history. The law had a catchy title: An Act to Promote the Safety of Employees and Travelers upon Railroads by Compelling Common Carriers Engaged in Interstate Commerce to Equip Their Cars with Automatic Couplers and Continuous Brakes and Their Locomotives with Driving-wheel Brakes, and for other Purposes. And that pretty much sums up what the law required.

The law, whose name was mercifully shortened to The Railroad Safety Appliance Act of 1893, was the culmination of the railroad safety reform movement that began in Massachusetts in 1871 in the aftermath of a disaster in Revere where a train packed with tourists was struck from behind by another speeding train that was unable to brake in time. Although a handful of states adopted railroad safety legislation after Revere, the railway interests were powerful and it would take another two decades for Congress to enact badly needed federal measures.

As a sop to the railway industry, the effective date of the new federal law was pushed back seven years to 1900. This turned out to be a disastrous decision. In 1894, a year after the law's enactment and six years before the date it was scheduled to go into effect, 1,823 workers were killed in railroad incidents; another 23,422 suffered serious injury. If you were working on the railroad back then, your odds of getting seriously injured were 1 in 33; if you were riding in the trains themselves, the odds increased to 12 to 1.

When the law finally did take effect, it produced the desired effect. The Railroad Safety Appliance Act was credited with the significant drop in railroad accidents in the early 20th century. The law, which has been amended many times, remains in effect to this day.

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