Use of the passive voice gives it a different rhythm. Contemporary "best practice" is to avoid writing in passive voice. What I find interesting is that using active voice for inanimate objects like brickwork and walls and carriages, seems a bit anthropomorphic or perhaps animistic. Sure, "the wall fell" but not by its own volition.

Yet, for me the passive voice in this passage bogs down a bit in the final phrasing as subordinate clauses convolute as multiple inanimates suffer external effects. But in the end, the use of passive voice allows "great injury" to be the subject of the first sentence and empowers the paragraph in a way that "The engine" as subject simply cannot.