In his work on American railroad accidents, Mark Aldrich notes that “railroads were a transformative technology; they were a dangerous one as well.” In fact, this also seemed to be the case for the Ottoman Empire. In the second half of the 19th and early 20th century, people in different regions of the empire witnessed numerous railroad accidents that caused deaths, injuries, and property damages. A considerable number of these accidents involved trespassers walking or sleeping on the tracks. Here are two examples. On 7 May 1888, a train headed from Buca to Izmir ran over and killed an old man named Black Ibrahim. While reconstructing how the accident occurred, witnesses stated that the old man climbed out of a ditch near a switch and suddenly got onto the tracks a few meters away from the train. About twenty years later, in July 1908, an elderly woman was struck and injured by an Oriental Railway Company train in Istanbul, while she was trying to cross the tracks. This paper deals with two inter-related questions about this type of accidents. First, it examines how people from different segments of Ottoman society responded to them. Drawing mainly on documents in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archive in Istanbul and newspaper reports, it shows that the death or injury of a trespasser at times sparked violent protests. Government officials at various times reported that trains involved in such accidents were stoned by crowds of angry protesters. The paper also demonstrates that besides these spontaneous protests, people both in urban and rural areas also undertook proactive efforts to improve railroad safety. For example, they had filed petitions asking the government and railway companies to construct fences at certain locations along railroad lines and to increase the number of watchmen. Second, the paper investigates how the Ottoman government and railway companies approached the issue of railroad safety and responded to the above-mentioned protests and petitions. Thus, it aims to shed some light on the negotiations that ensued between societal actors and agents of the government and railway companies over railroad safety and on the outcomes of these negotiations. While doing this, it seeks to situate the Ottoman Empire in a broader context by highlighting and explaining similarities and differences between the empire and its counterparts in Asia, Europe, and North America in dealing with the dangers of a new transportation technology.