The locomotive, its fire and steam quenched by the freezing water, had vanished from sight. The carriages settled in their precarious position. Sixty souls were dead or dying. The deceased were beyond complaint; the survivors momentarily mute. Over the darkening scene, quietness settled.
CHAPTER TWO
The Next Few Moments
The silence lasted only a few moments. One contemporary account describes the emergence of “cries and shrieks, groans and obdurations [sic] of unearthly intensity.” Even given Victorian hyperbole, that can have not been much of an exaggeration. The devastation was truly shocking. Victorian rolling stock was massively, albeit not scientifically, built. The fall of more than forty feet and the impact with the solid surface and the flying debris of seats, stoves, and other equipment resulted in tremendous crushing and cutting injuries. There was immediate peril of drowning and hypothermia, and shock threatened the soaked victims of open cuts and fractures.
Help was not far away. At first it was the numbed survivors, many of them crew members and off-duty employees, who dragged themselves to the aid of their fellow travellers. In fact, a surprising number of railway men experienced dramatic last-second escapes. Perhaps that reflected the sense of ever-looming disaster that characterized Great Western operations. Just-relieved switchman David Crombie was in the best position to save himself. He had placed but a single foot on the very bottom step of the last car before realizing that something was amiss, he had only to drop off and watch helplessly as the train crashed through the bridge. Within a few moments that car leaned precariously against the abutment and he was scurrying to obtain a rope to lower to its shocked occupants.
Before slipping off the train, Crombie was able to call out a warning to those in the last car. William Muir, assistant superintendent on the GWR, was reading in the last seat of that last car. Hearing that cry and feeling the uneven movement of the train, he quickly rose, flung open the rear door, and jumped to safety. Travelling GWR Auditor Richard Jessup, aboard the same car, sensed something wrong and saw conductor Edward Barrett struggling to undo the coupling at the front of the car — or so he thought. The impossibility of such a feat when a train is in motion makes that an unlikely exercise to attempt. In any case Barrett made no claim to such heroics. Standing on the car’s front platform he said he heard the brake whistle and someone yell jump — so he did! The example was compelling enough for the auditor. He too jumped, and witnessed the disaster unfolding. Then, wasting no time, Auditor Jessup clambered up the steep side of the embankment and scurried across the high-level suspension bridge. There he begged a ride aboard a passing farm wagon to take him to the terminal where he could raise the alarm.
Locomotive headlights cast macabre shadows over the disaster scene in this somewhat inaccurate contemporary sketch. The actual bridge latticework was much taller and did not extend beyond the vertical pier.
Hamilton Public Library, Local History & Archives, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 4, 1857.
Edward Sevier, twenty-five-year-old baggageman, in the leading vehicle had an even closer brush with death. Having gathered the Hamilton luggage by the open door he was perched on top of it when he heard the sharp whistle. On looking out he actually claimed to have seen the engine sinking before he too leapt to safety. Forty years later, when he was the only known surviving rail hand to have been on the wreck, he held by his story. In 1897 he told a reporter:
I saw on looking out of the door the coupling between the tender and (baggage) car break. I saw the engine and tender breaking through the bridge and thinking it was time to get off, I jumped and found myself lying on my back with my head not a foot from the stonework. I saw the engineer throw up his hands as if to jump, but he poor fellow went down with his engine. My chum Henry Urquhart, the express messenger, also went to his death, not being able to get out of the door on the other side of the car.
Traumatic as the experience was, Sevier stayed with the railway long enough to put in twenty-seven years of service and live through several wrecks before retiring to take up the less vicarious life of a letter carrier.
Brakeman Michael Duffey had a similar hair’s-breadth escape. He saw Crombie drop-off, heard the whistle, knew that steam had been turned off, and saw “that the engine had gone.” In that split-second he jumped and landed just four yards from the edge.
Edwin Richardson, an off-duty conductor, was blissfully asleep in the baggage car. He had no opportunity to react. The first he knew of the disaster was when he was woken by breaking timbers, an explosion of stove ashes, and the onrush of freezing water. That galvanized him into action. Smashing the window, he crawled out onto the ice. There, however, dazed and in pain, he could play no part in the immediate rescue. He recovered sufficiently a little later to try, along with switchman Crombie, to ascertain the cause of the disaster by examining the switch by lamplight.
One of the first non-participants to reach the scene was Diana House, who lived just 100 yards away on the Toronto side, close to the lake. With her sixteen-year-old daughter, she was drawn by the strange sounds emanating from the close-by train and witnessed the drama unfold. Immediately she rushed to the edge of the canal to render what assistance she could. Others shortly joined her.
Although a mile and a half away, the Hamilton station was within sight of the bridge. Whether alerted by Jessup’s alarm or the strange activity around the bridge in the failing light, the railway staff was galvanized into action. They formed the vanguard of the hundreds of would-be rescuers and the plain curious who streamed out to the bridge, along the line, and across the ice. The proximity of GWR workshops and yards made it possible to respond quickly with heavy equipment. Special trains were marshalled: first to carry apparatus, later to transport the dead and injured. Ropes and ladders were positioned to help rescuers and wounded scramble up and down the steep banks of the canal. The militia was called in. Major Alfred Booker Junior (whose father, Alfred Senior, the hell-fire preacher, was among the victims) stationed his company of troops at the depot to restore order and deter looters. Captain Macdonald’s Rifles were marched to the disaster scene to provide assistance.
Recovery efforts continued through the night and the following day. It was bitterly cold, but thankfully moonlit. Locomotive headlights were rigged at the scene — casting both helpful light and eerie shadow. At first, efforts were directed toward releasing those trapped in the near-vertical second car, perilously inclined against the abutment.
One of those extracted from that last car was a Woodstock dry-goods merchant by the name of W.R. Marshall, who was seated four seats from the back. He was alerted by the “oscillation of the car” and the mounting alarm displayed by the crew and his fellow travellers. A take-charge type of person and unaware of the proximity of the bridge, Marshall stayed put and calmly advised others to do the same. Given the providential escapes of those who jumped that was clearly rather dubious advice — but there is no evidence that anyone heeded his poor counsel. Marshall grimly rode down with the last car. When the front of it smashed into the rock-hard surface of the frozen canal, seats, fittings, hand luggage, and occupants were torn from their places to lodge in a sickening mass of humanity, wood, and iron at the partly submerged front-end of the car. Here, in total darkness, Marshall found himself crushed “almost to suffocation.” With blood oozing from his mouth and fearing that his next breath must be his last, he can perhaps be forgiven for his theatrical reconstruction of his circumstances.
The next few moments were the worst I ever witnessed: oh that it may never be my lot to experience the like again. Some prayed, others called upon the saints, others swore fearful oaths, and all seemed writhing in the deepest agony. I can only liken the place to a slaughterhouse. The blood streamed down over my face and clothes as if some huge beast had been slain above me.
Further in his recorded recollections, the saintly Marshall waxed even more melodramatic.
What an awful lesson does this shocking event teach those who habitually put off making their peace with God to some future day, or to a death bed. The writer of these few lines will consider himself