Horse rail crash death toll halves

I saw the headline ‘Horse rail crash death toll halves’ and I was momentarily puzzled, wondering what a horse rail was then remembered all the westerns I had seen as a child where the laconic cowboy rides up on his laconic horse and laconically hitches it to the horse rail outside the saloon… I mentally deviated for a moment to a site I had looked at recently about knots, where there had been a comment that the way cowboys are depicted hitching their steeds to the rail was inaccurate, for a start the loop of the reins would come untied and the horse would wander off, and secondly, shop and saloon keepers didn’t want horse outside their stores and bars leaving a mess in the street and the bests would be tied up round the side or back, put into a stable or most likely into a corral off the main street.

Back to the headline; I hadn’t realised there were so many serious accidents involving horse rails but with the popularity of riding these days maybe it was so… and then I wondered why I hadn’t read about any of these unfortunate deaths as I read the news every day…

…and then I realised… It wasn’t ‘horse-rail’ but ‘horse rail-deaths’; there had been a terrible accident in East Anglia where some horses had wandered into the path of a train and been killed; originally it was thought that a dozen of the poor creatures had died, but the number had been revised, and it had halved. So, no-one had been killed by a horse rail, but six poor horses had been killed on the rails.