Borki train disaster

is one of many churches built to glorify God for the emperor's survival. The imperial family was en route from Crimea to Saint Petersburg. Contrary to railway rules of the period that limited commercial passenger trains to 42 axles, the imperial train of fifteen carriages had 64 axles. Its weight was within the limits set for freight trains, but the train actually travelled at express speeds. It was hauled by two steam engines, a combination that caused dangerous vibrations that, according to Witte, directly caused the derailment. ==Publicity==

The survival of the Romanovs was celebrated. When Alexander returned to Saint Petersburg and went to the Kazan Cathedral, university students wanted to unharness his carriage and pull it by hand. In the view of the established religion, the salvation of the imperial family was hailed as divine intervention by the Sovereign. Pamphlets by clergymen linked the miraculous escape to the miracles of 17th-century icons at the end of the great plague of 1654–1655; the laity believed that prayers in front of these icons enabled the survival of the emperor. A special icon of the ''God's Grace on the 17th of October'', made for the occasion, widely circulated in photographic copies. Moscow, the old shrine of Orthodoxy, was perceived as the source of the miracle; a contemporary pamphlet declared that the "power that Moscow had professed and that had exalted her revoked these laws [of Nature]". ==Investigation==

and the Harbin Orthodox Cathedral. Immediately after the crash, the Chief Inspector of Railways, Baron Sherval, who had been travelling on the royal train and had broken his leg in the crash, summoned railway manager Witte and director of the Kharkov Technical Institute, Victor Kirpichev, to lead the investigation on site. Anatoly Koni, an influential public lawyer, was dispatched from Saint Petersburg later. In the preceding years, Witte had been regularly involved in managing imperial train journeys across his railroad and was well known to the emperor. Two months before the crash, Alexander, upset about Witte's insistence on reducing train speed limits, had publicly chastised him and his railway, referring to its owners' ethnicity: "Nowhere else has my speed been reduced; your railroad is an impossible one because it is a Jewish road". According to Witte, he had warned the government earlier of the deficiencies in train setup, notably using paired steam engines and faulty saloon cars. The three investigators disagreed on the direct cause of the crash. Witte insisted that it was caused by speeding, exonerating railroad management; Kirpichev blamed rotten wooden ties, whilst Koni shifted the blame onto the railroad, exonerating state officials. In the end, Alexander preferred to close the case quietly, allowed Sherval and Posyet to retire, and appointed Witte as the director of Imperial Railways. Despite Witte's efforts, railroad management did not escape public attention. The contractor who built the Kursk-Kharkov line, Samuel Polyakov, who died two months before the crash, was posthumously linked to inferior construction quality of the railroad. The public particularly "credited" him with substandard gravel ballast pads that failed to cushion track vibrations as they were supposed to. == See also ==