A couple of months ago this column described a cluster of railway accidents in Wellington County during the fall of 1912. The first two decades of the 20th century saw an extraordinary number of railway accidents on our local lines.
There were several reasons. Traffic, freight and passenger, increased dramatically in that period. Much of the equipment and track operated by the railways was aging and in poor repair. The biggest factor, though, seems to have been the incompetence of some railway employees, and a cavalier attitude to safety and proper practices by others.
The busiest line in Wellington County at that time was Canadian Pacific’s main line passing through the southern tier of Puslinch Township. That line had been constructed by the Credit Valley Railway in the late 1870s, connecting Toronto with Woodstock and St. Thomas. In 1883 Canadian Pacific took over the Credit Valley, and by 1890 had extended the track to Windsor and connections with American lines.
With the completion of the extension the line became an important one. Canadian Pacific installed double track from Toronto to Guelph Junction. There were plans to extend the second track as far as London, but that work remained on the drawing board.
The volume of traffic on the single track portion kept station agents on their toes, issuing orders to trains to take sidings to permit traffic in the opposite direction to pass. An error in those instructions could result in a smash-up.
The inevitable happened on May 13, 1909, a Thursday. The operator at Guelph Junction received an order to hold a west-bound freight train at his station to await the arrival of an eastbound freight train. Either he was not paying close attention to the instructions or he was too slow in handing the orders to the engineer. In any case, the westbound left the Junction, the crew unaware that it was heading into the path of a train that had already departed Galt.
The agent at Schaw Station, as the Puslinch station was then called, was surprised to see the westbound train pass. Quickly a sickening feeling overcame him, as he realized an eastbound train would arrive shortly.
The time was about 5:30pm, and there was still plenty of light. Not too far beyond the Puslinch station the engine crews of both trains saw smoke ahead, and realized there was another train on the single track. Both engineers put the brakes on their trains into emergency.
The trains slowed down but the crews realized their trains would not stop in time to avoid a collision. The men in both cabs jumped from their locomotives before the locomotives met.
Fortunately, no one suffered more than a few scratches and scrapes.
The engines did not fare so well. Both were big, relatively new freight locomotives, and both sustained significant damage to their front ends. The force knocked both off the tracks. The first freight car in each of the trains was demolished, and there was some damage to some of the other cars.
Before the dust had settled the agent at Schaw had called for the “big hook,” as the wrecking crane is called by railroaders. With no serious injuries, time was now the chief consideration.
The line was open again in less than four hours, a remarkable achievement. A Galt engine and crew managed to pull most of the eastbound train back to Galt, and the wrecking crew had the westbound back in the yard at Guelph Junction. The crippled locomotives sat on a siding at Schaw Station, and what was left of the wrecked cars was moved to the side of the track at the point of the collision.
The line was a key link for passenger trains and mail. Freight trains seldom ran on priority schedules in those days, and delays to them were of little consequence. Quite the opposite was the case with passenger trains, which often carried important people with appointments to meet, and mail which was not to be delayed.
In 1909 there were five passenger trains in each direction through Puslinch, two of which carried through cars between Toronto and Chicago. At that time those were the most important trains on the CPR system. Four passenger trains were scheduled over the line in the three hours after the wreck, and officials did not want to cause any more delay than possible.
Dispatchers sent a westbound local passenger train as far as Schaw station, where it waited three hours for the wreck scene to be cleared and the priority trains to pass. The flyer from Chicago to Toronto was the first train through, running about 90 minutes late. Connections at Toronto had been delayed pending its arrival. The evening train from Toronto to Detroit and Chicago slipped through about an hour late. Service on the line was back to normal well before midnight.
Because there were no fatalities or serious injuries, there was no public inquiry. Railway officials dealt with the assignment of blame through an internal investigation. It is probable that at least one employee found himself walking the streets after the inquiry for neglecting to follow prescribed procedures.
Though it may not be related to the collision, the railway a short time later installed a long passing siding at Puslinch.
Many railroaders were superstitious men in those days, and were convinced that wrecks occurred in clusters of three. In this case, there were no other major incidents on that line that spring or summer.
Undoubtedly, the May 13 crash caused workers to be more alert and supervisors to be more diligent in enforcing rules and prescribed routines. It had been a close call, and had the weather been bad or the engineers less alert, several men could have met their deaths.
On Nov. 3, though, there was another head-on collision in the area, this one also the result of human error. That wreck occurred on the Canadian Pacific line less than two miles south of Orangeville.
Two freight trains met head on. Neither was moving at a fast speed, but there were minor injuries to three men, and serious cuts and abrasions to a fourth. Neither crew was aware of the presence of the other train until almost the moment of impact.
That incident was the fault of the Toronto dispatcher. He issued orders to a freight train at Orangeville to proceed, forgetting that he had issued a similar order to a northbound train a short time before, which the northbound train received at a station named Melville Junction.
The situation was what is known in the railway industry as a lap order. It normally results in unpleasant consequences because two trains cannot occupy the same piece of track at the same time. As there was no death, that mishap was also dealt with internally by Canadian Pacific. No doubt the result was a job opening in Toronto for a dispatcher.
Neither of those incidents received a great deal of press coverage: they both involved freight trains, rather than passenger. And neither resulted in serious injury or death. Nevertheless, they surely impressed on members of the public that rail travel could be very dangerous in the early 20th century.