1887 — Feb 5, Train derails (broken rail) into White River, burns, near Hartford, VT–30-40
Last edit on 10-28-2023 by Wayne Blanchard for upload to: http://www.usdeadlyevents.com/
–50-60 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Feb 12, 1887 (noted in Celebrate Boston).
— 40 Celebrate Boston. Boston Disasters. “Vermont Central Wreck, 1887.”
— 40 Chautauquan. “Summary of Important News for February, 1887,” The V7, Feb 1887.
— <40 Heller. “Fire and Ice. Anatomy of Vermont’s worst train wreck…1887…” 12-27-2014.[1]
— ~40 Philadelphia Record Almanac 1888. “General and Local Events, Feb, 1887,” p. 90.
— 38 Holbrook, Stewart H. The Story of American Railroads (5th printing). 1989, p. 283.
— 38 Wikipedia. “List of Rail Accidents (pre 1950).
— 30 Willsey/Lewis. “Memorable Railroad Accidents,” Harper’s Book of Facts. 1895, 674.
— 29 New York Times. “Twenty-Two Bodies Identified,” Feb 13, 1887, p. 7.
Narrative Information
Celebrate Boston: “On Saturday February 5, 1887, the worst accident in Vermont history occurred at the town of Hartford. An express train to Montreal jumped the rails and plunged over a gorge into the ice-laden White River. More than 40 people perished, with many passengers burned to death in the splintered coaches that were embedded in the ice below. Many Bostonians were passengers on this train. The February 12, 1887 edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper describes this tragic event:
“One of the most frightful railway disasters of recent years occurred early on Saturday morning last, on the Vermont Central Railroad, some four miles from White River Junction. The wrecked train, the Montreal express, consisted of an engine, one baggage and express car, one mail car, two ordinary passenger coaches, the sleeping car St. Albans, from Springfield, Mass., and the Pullman sleeper Pilgrim, from Boston. The car St. Albans carried about twenty-six passengers. There were forty in the Pilgrim, from Boston. Besides these were about fifty way passengers.
Four miles north of White River Junction the Vermont Central road crosses the White River, on a bridge 650 feet long. The water is fifty feet below the rails and is eight feet deep. When the disaster occurred, at 3 o’clock on Saturday morning, there were two feet of ice on it and the thermometer marked 20 degrees below zero. The abutments of the bridge are of gray granite, as are the three piers at equal distances between them.
It was at this point that the train met its fate—a broken rail 200 feet from the bridge being the cause. Whether the train broke the frosty rail, throwing the cars from the track, whether the rail was broken before the train arrived, or whether some wheel gave way and snapped the rail is not known, and may never be known.
In an instant there was a jar, a bumping of trucks over the railroad ties. The coupling between the forward sleeper and the four following cars broke, the engine, baggage and smoking cars passed on to the bridge and over in safety, but the other four cars bumped along over the ties to the end of the bridge, knocked out the heavy timbers which rested on the abutment, and then toppled over—bridge, cars and human freight, fully eighty souls all told, falling with a tremendous crash down the jagged precipice seventy feet, striking upon the frozen surface of the river.
Then followed a scene which beggars all power of human description. The splintered wreck took fire, and the dark gorge, from which the moon was hidden, was soon lighted up by the glare of burning coaches and bridge timbers. The detached portion of the train was stopped and run back to the scene as soon as possible. Those on board sprang into the deep snow and made their way as best they could down the steep banks to assist any in the wreck who were alive.
Here and there a man or woman had succeeded in getting extricated from the debris by leaving part of his or her clothing behind, and, in spite of the intense cold and their half-clothed condition, were bravely rendering all the assistance in their power to rescue their less fortunate companions. Many were pinned beneath huge timbers, beyond all human aid. The groans of the half-conscious dying, the screams of the burning, mingled with the hoarse shouts of the trainmen and a few farmers who had arrived on the scene, made a pandemonium.
Very little could be done to aid the injured. and absolutely nothing toward quenching the flames. The ice on the river was two feet thick, and no water could be procured. At least forty persons were killed outright or burned to death. Three only of the killed were recovered from the wreck. About forty persons escaped, most of them being badly maimed or burned, some of whom will die.
It is believed that between fifty and sixty persons in all perished. The heat being strong enough to melt the ice in some places, many of the dead probably fell in the current and so were carried away. Among the unfortunate passengers were a number who were on their way to the Montreal carnival.
The search for the bodies of victims was carried on through Saturday and Sunday, but only the remains of a very few were recognizable.”
(Celebrate Boston. Boston Disasters. “Vermont Central Wreck, 1887.”)
Chautauquan: “Boston and Montreal express train wrecked near Woodstock, Vt. Forty lives lost.” (Chautauquan. “Summary of Important News for February, 1887,” V7/N8, Apr 1887, p.442.)
Heller: “Nearly 40 passengers and trainmen died after the coaches and sleeping cars hit a broken rail and separated from the train. The momentum propelled the derailed cars alongside the tracks and bridge and into the chasm of the White River. Coal stoves and kerosene lamps soon turned the wrecked passenger sleeper cars into an inferno on that frigid night of Feb. 5, 1887….How many of the 89 passengers and crew members died in the wreck is unclear. Various accounts list the number variously as 30, 31, 34 and 37.
“The cause of the wreck was pinned on a defective rail discovered by a professor and students from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering who visited the site 10 hours after the accident. ‘The defect in the rail could not have been discovered before it broke,’ declared the state’s Railroad Commission after investigating. The commission concluded that “there was no culpable negligence on the part of the railroad company,” which may have indicated that this was a time that accepted that accidents happen, or that the commission was cozy with the railroad industry.
“But that doesn’t mean that the wreck didn’t teach a valuable lesson. Congress and state legislatures reacted in horror to the carnage. They decided that if they couldn’t stop trains from derailing occasionally, they could at least make them less like rolling Molotov cocktails. Congress and the states established new safety regulations, calling for the replacement of gas lights and coal stoves with electric lights and steam heating.
“It might be a coincidence, but in the years following the West Hartford wreck, the nation’s annual railroad death toll dropped 60 percent….” (Heller. Paul. “Fire and Ice. Anatomy of Vermont’s worst train wreck, an 1887 disaster in Hartford.” Rutland Herald, VT. 12-27-2014, updated 10-30-2018.)
Philadelphia Record Almanac 1888: February 5, 1887. “Two passenger coaches and two sleepers of an express train for Montreal, on the Vermont Central Railroad, in consequence of a broken rail, went over a bridge at Hartford, Vt., and into a frozen creek fifty feet below, and the wrecked cars ignited from the stoves, causing a loss of about forty lives and the serious injury of forty more persons by the fall and the fire.” (Philadelphia Record Almanac 1888. “General and Local Events, Feb, 1887,” p. 90.)
Newspaper
Feb 12: “White River Junction, Vt., Feb 12. – Two more bodies of victims of the recent disaster were identified to-day….This makes 22 bodies that have been identified, and 7 are still in the Morgue awaiting identification.” (NYT. “Twenty-Two Bodies Identified,” Feb 13, 1887, p. 7.)
Sources
Celebrate Boston. Boston Disasters. “Vermont Central Wreck, 1887.” Accessed 10-2-2009 at: http://www.celebrateboston.com/disasters/railroad/vermontcentralwreck.htm
Chautauqua Institution. “Summary of Important News for February, 1887,” The Chautauquan. Vol. 7, No. 8, April 1887, p. 442. Meadville, PA T.L. Flood Publishing House. Accessed at: http://books.google.com/books?id=JSYZAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Heller. Paul. “Fire and Ice. Anatomy of Vermont’s worst train wreck, an 1887 disaster in Hartford.” Rutland Herald, VT. 12-27-2014, updated 10-30-2018. Accessed 10-29-2023 at: https://www.rutlandherald.com/news/fire-and-ice-anatomy-of-vermont-146-s-worst-train-wreck-an-1887-disaster-in/article_0bdc0e86-a172-5c4a-bc0e-3d0c485e4cf4.html
Holbrook, Stewart H. The Story of American Railroads (5th printing). New York: Crown Publishers, 1959.
Philadelphia Record Almanac 1888. “General and Local Events, Feb, 1887,” p. 90.
Wikipedia. “List of Rail Accidents (Pre-1950).” Accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pre-1950_rail_accidents
Willsey, Joseph H. (Compiler), Charlton T. Lewis (Editor). Harper’s Book of Facts: A Classified History of the World. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1895. Accessed 9-4-2017 at: http://books.google.com/books?id=UcwGAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false
New York Times. “Twenty-Two Bodies Identified,” Feb 13, 1887, p. 7. Accessed at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9800E0D91538E533A25750C1A9649C94669FD7CF
[1] “Nearly 40 passengers and trainmen died…”