The following is a re-print of a past column by former Advertiser columnist Stephen Thorning, who passed away on Feb. 23, 2015.
Some text has been updated to reflect changes since the original publication and any images used may not be the same as those that accompanied the original publication.
The inspiration for this week’s column was found in three photo postcards of a 10-6 train wreck on the Grand Trunk Railway which were passed along to me by Ruth Hodgins of Toronto.
The photos were taken by John Connon, an Elora photographer, historian and relative of Ms. Hodgins. The messages written on the back of the postcards provide some of the details of the crash, indicating that it took place 1.5 miles north of Fergus, on June 4, 1906.
I had seen one of these postcards before, and thought it had been one of several derailments at Swan Creek, south of Elora, a couple of years earlier.
The postcards were made by John Connon, who had them on the market soon after the crash. These three were sent on June 18, two weeks after the wreck.
The train involved in the crash was pulled by two locomotives, hauling 23 freight cars, and was southbound. The crash occurred where the track cut across the Bill Byers farm on Lot 18, Concession 14 of Nichol township, about 800 feet from the Allardice school.
Two horses belonging to Mr. Byers had wandered onto the tracks, and the train hit one of them at about 2am. The message on one of the postcards cards states that the horse was lying on the tracks, but it is more likely that the noise and headlight of the train confused the horse and it ran into the path of the train. The railway had been told that the fence isolating the track was broken, but had not sent a crew to fix it.
Both locomotives and 13 freight cars left the rails, ploughing up about 150 feet of track. The locomotives landed in the ditch on the west side of the track, with the tenders on the east side, and the splintered wooden freight cars and their contents scattered everywhere.
There were five men in the locomotives: engineers Angel and Jeffrey, firemen Muirhead and Collins, and brakeman John Pettigrew. Amazingly, none were seriously injured, and only one required more than a few hours of care at Groves’ hospital.
It was something of a miracle that neither boiler exploded, and that the wreckage did not catch fire.
The railway sent cranes and crews from Palmerston and Stratford to clean up the mess. It took more than two days, working day and night, to get the track back in service. The locomotives and parts of the cars were salvaged; the rest was burned beside the track.
Some of the freight was saved as well. While the track was out of service, the Grand Trunk rerouted trains via Stratford, and provided local service from Fergus to Guelph.
The freight on the train included a carload of bricks (probably from the brick works at Drew, east of Clifford), seven cars of cement (probably from the plant at Durham), a carload of railway ties, a carload of flour, and two carloads of lumber. It was a heavy train, requiring two locomotives.
Curiously, the Elora Express newspaper ignored this story completely. The event was covered by most of the other papers.
J.C. Templin, of the Fergus News Record, published three photographs as well as a major story. These photographs may have been taken by John Connon, and it is possible that more postcards exist.
Railway buffs will be wanting to know more about the two locomotives involved in the wreck. The Grand Trunk renumbered and repainted all its locomotives in 1904, which hides the fact that both were more than 30 years old, and had probably racked up more than half a million miles in service.
Over the years, both had been altered considerably: narrower smokestacks when they were converted to coal, shorter cowcatchers on the front, and air pumps when air brakes became standard railway equipment.
In the 1870s, the Grand Trunk had changed the gauge of its track from 5 feet, 6 inches to 4 feet, 8.5 inches. Rather than rebuild its engines, the railway bought new ones: 270 of them in one two-year period in 1873-74. These locomotives date from that period. Both were of the 4-4-0 wheel arrangement, the standard of the time.
The lead locomotive in the crash, No. 372, was part of an order of 23 from the Portland Company, of Portland, Maine. It was built in December 1873, with cylinders 17-by-24 inches, 63-inch driving wheels, and 140 pounds of boiler pressure. It had been rebuilt in 1892 with a new boiler. No. 372 was rebuilt following the wreck, and served until 1919.
The second locomotive, No. 364, came from the Kingston Locomotive Works, in Kingston, Ontario in October 1873. Part of an order of 12, it weighed 38 tons, very light by 20th century standards, but a benefit on the light track of branch lines. No. 364 was scrapped in 1908; it may not have been repaired after the crash.
Of the 12 engines in the 1873 order from Kingston, only three were left by 1906. On the other hand, most of the 23 engines from the 1873 Portland order were still in service in 1906, and several lasted into the 1920s.
*This column was originally published in the Elora Sentinel on April 12, 1994.
