Boston & Maine Railroad Derailment Investigation: Medford, Massachusetts, November 19, 1957

This document follows the Accident Reports Act of 1910, using the formal methodology that mid-20th-century U.S. transportation safety built its practices upon. Train No. 30, traveling at 57 mph, derailed entering a temporary main track in rain, involving 9 cars and diesel-electric units 4224A and 4224B. The investigation identified excessive speed on the temporary track as the cause. The report represents the genre of transportation safety investigation circa 1958: methodical, public, and prescriptive about both immediate causes and systemic failures. The formal structure and technical language capture railroad accident analysis before the NTSB's formation in 1970 and before modern root-cause analysis frameworks. Specificity (exact locomotive numbers, speed measurements, weather, casualty count) grounds the narrative in physical fact rather than speculation.