As the anticipated train crash finally occurs, Donoghue subverts the reader’s expectations by allowing its passengers to escape unscathed. The only fatality is Marie Haguillard, a newspaper seller who exists outside the railway system’s hierarchy. Donoghue grants her a fleeting instant of terrible privilege before her annihilation: “Marie is the sole witness, history’s honoured guest, for half a second” before the engine and the collapsing station crushes and “erases” her (249). The abrupt line break before “Erasing her” transforms death into something bureaucratic and impersonal, as though industrial catastrophe performs deletion rather than murder. Marie’s death becomes the clearest expression of The Human Cost of Technological Progress. Engine 721 has fulfilled its destiny of becoming “headline news on every front page” (244), while the woman selling newspapers for 15 centimes is reduced to debris.

At the same moment that the engine kills Marie, the women of Front Third deliver Cécile’s baby. Donoghue deliberately juxtaposes violent destruction with collaborative creation, so that the train is simultaneously a site of catastrophe and communal care. Mado, who spent the journey imagining her fellow passengers as collateral damage, helps to save both mother and child, shouting “Come on!” and rubbing at the silent baby until it gives a thin cry. Madame Baudin sets the lunch bucket upright, Blonska cuts the cord with sewing scissors, and the other female passengers donate “various bits of cloth for swaddling, and a few coins” (258). Even disagreements such as the oyster-woman’s folk advice and Madame Baudin’s sharp dismissal of it become signs of shared involvement. The Possibilities of Connections with Strangers are realized as a Russian émigrée, a Breton maid, an oyster-seller, and a would-be bomber pool resources for a stranger’s child. At the same time, Donoghue emphasizes that the intimacy the passengers experience on the train will quickly dissolve. Its transience is emphasized on the station platform when Marcelle releases Henry’s hand the moment two guards arrive, redirecting their attention to his sprained ankle before hurrying off. The formality of her parting words, “Thank you, Mr. Tanner, and good day,” (254) reinforce the characters’ reversion to their assigned societal classes.

The narrative returns to the symbolism of the lunch bucket as Mado’s bomb, abandoned during the baby’s delivery, survives the crash, but her plan does not. In the aftermath, Mado recognizes the narcissism embedded within the version of revolutionary violence she constructed, reflecting “she wanted glory, the same martyr’s crown as handsome Émile Henry on the guillotine, and she was willing to build a pyre of human beings to win it” (258-59). Her tears, she realizes, are not truly for the passengers she nearly murdered but for herself—for the lost fantasy of martyrdom and historical glory. Although her social grievances remain, she abandons her belief that spectacular violence can turn her suffering into meaning or transcendence. Her disposal of the bomb materials reinforces this shift through deliberately mundane actions. She empties the charcoal, nails, saltpetre, sugar, and match heads into a rubbish bin, and plans to pour away the acid in the first drain she finds. When she concludes that the world remains “filthy” but resolves “to leave it a little cleaner than she found it” (260), she commits to more incremental ethical action.

The novel’s concluding sharpens its critique of The Human Cost of Technological Progress as the young photographer, rushing to capture the first picture, realizes that the workmen collecting Marie’s remains in a bucket threaten to ruin his composition. His justification for cutting this from the shot—that he is granting the victim “privacy”—is undercut by the narration’s aside, “Or, put another way, he’ll leave her out of the picture. He’ll simplify, paring down this complicated story to a clean, absurd image of catastrophe, one that will live for the ages” (261-62). Marie is therefore erased for a second time in the photograph that immortalizes the crash. Donoghue’s reference to the Photosphère company and its industrialized image production links technological disaster to the machinery of representation that follows it. The price of technological progress includes the process that sanitizes Marie’s death for public consumption.