Historians of North American railways have noted that the first decade of the 20th century was the worst ever for accidents of all types. Daily and weekly newspapers carried gruesome tales of collisions and derailments that make us shudder today.
There were several reasons for the carnage. Tonnage and passenger traffic escalated dramatically from the mid 1890s, straining the capacity of the railways to deal with them. Most lines, and especially the branches, were saddled with old equipment, and the track was often in a poor state of maintenance. Everything suffered from deferred maintenance. Employees frequently had inadequate training, and tackled their jobs with a sense of bravado that excluded all safety considerations.
The situation was especially bad on Canada’s Grand Trunk Railway, and particularly so on the dense network of branch lines operated by the company. Canadian Pacific usually has the place of dominance in history books, but in southern Ontario the Grand Trunk was by far the more important transportation network.
During the 1870s and 1880s the Grand Trunk had scooped up most of the small, independent lines in southern Ontario, in large part to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Canadian Pacific. As a business plan that was not a wise policy. Much of the mileage proved to be marginally profitable at best.
The Grand Trunk limped along with its branches, such as those that crisscrossed Wellington, until upgrading could no longer be postponed. In the meantime, the company suffered a continual stream complaints about services and facilities. And all the while, employee morale remained low, resulting in proper procedures ignored and tasks not completed properly. That resulted in even more incidents and wrecks.
One of the latter occurred on May 2, 1908. It was a Saturday evening, shortly before 9pm, and a dozen or so passengers stood on the platform at the Moorefield station waiting for Number 19, the train from Guelph to Palmerston and on to Southampton. At Palmerston, the train connected with other trains to Owen Sound, Durham, and Kincardine.
A few minutes before the passenger train was due, a freight train appeared from the other direction. It stopped, and a brakeman threw a switch at the west end of the yard. The freight then rolled into the siding, but it was too long for the track. Three cars and the caboose remained on the main line.
Ordinarily that would not have been a problem at Moorefield. The passenger train would roll up to the station on the main line and stop. The freight would then proceed through the switch at the east end of the siding. By the time the passengers had been boarded, and mail and express transferred from the train, the rear of the freight train would have cleared the west switch.
At least, that is the way it was supposed to happen. When the passenger train appeared from the east, it slowed down slightly, but did not stop at the station, to the shock of the waiting passengers and the station agent. Witnesses estimated its speed at about 20 miles per hour.
The train consisted of a mail car, a baggage car, a smoker (combination lounge and men’s section where men could smoke pipes and cigars), and three coaches. Approaching the west switch, the locomotive sideswiped a couple of freight cars where the siding joined the main line. That pulled piping and various attachments from the side of the locomotive. It then plowed into the freight cars directly in its path. Two boxcars were reduced to kindling and tossed to the side of the track. The second-to-last freight car was filled with cement from the plant at Durham. Hitting that heavy load brought the train, which by now was travelling at less than 10 miles per hour, to a shuddering halt.
The force of the impact lifted the locomotive into the air, off its wheels, and twisted one of the cylinder off the engine. When movement stopped it was half buried in the ditch, enveloped in a cloud of gushing steam. The car of cement went into the ditch on the other side of the track, alongside what was left of the other wrecked freight cars.
It all happened within sight of the horrified passengers, who squinted through the darkness from the station platform. They reported that the collision seemed to happen in slow motion. Unbelievably, there were only two injuries. The conductor, Joe Cox, had set the handbrakes on the baggage car and the smoker, and then jumped off the train. He received bad cuts to his face, and his clothing was torn to rags. The fireman, Alf Smith, also jumped, but his timing was poor. He landed on the rails in front of a tool house. Smith received a nasty gash on the top of his head, and he twisted his knee badly. The rest of the crew, including engineer Tom Benetto, of Palmerston, also jumped. All alighted safely.
The mail and baggage cars left the rails but remained upright. All three passenger cars and the smoker stayed on the track. Those aboard received a severe shaking, but none sustained injuries. Most of the seats in the cars were occupied. The Saturday evening train was always well patronized, and on this evening there were more passengers than usual. Many of them were farmers, returning from a big horse show in Toronto.
Tom Benetto claimed that the air brakes on his train had failed. He attempted to slow the train with the locomotive brake only. He had orders to meet the freight train at Moorefield, but did not know that it was too long for the siding until he saw its rear portion directly ahead. He whistled for the other crew members to set the hand brakes on the cars, but by then it was too late to avoid a collision.
When the passengers stepped off the train to see what happened they were astonished at the severity of the crash. Most expressed surprise that they received nothing more than a severe jostling.
Telegraph messages to Palmerston brought aid in the form of a special train, which arrived about a half hour after the wreck, to pick up the passengers and take them on to Palmerston and their connecting trains. In the meantime, Conductor Cox took charge of the situation, despite his injuries. He asked volunteers to carry Fireman Smith to Rolls’s Hotel, where he could rest and receive medical attention.
This was one of the less disruptive of the Grand Trunk’s wrecks in Wellington County in the early 20th century. There were no serious injuries. Cleanup crews spent most of Sunday, when no trains were scheduled, picking up the pieces of the wrecked cars and locomotive and restoring the track.
In May of 1908 the Grand Trunk was in the midst of a program to upgrade and strengthen the track and bridges on its lines through Wellington. That permitted the company to use heavier locomotives, and retire the old ones that then plied those lines. Most dated to the 1870s. In the end, that meant a dramatic reduction in train wrecks.
There were no court cases resulting from the 1908 Moorefield wreck, making it somewhat unusual for that time. The Grand Trunk and other railways faced a rising tide of criminal charges, civil suits, and thorough coroner’s inquiries after 1900. That was further incentive to improve equipment and operating procedures to avoid collisions and derailments.
The waiting passengers who witnessed the wreck had a memory they would never forget, and a tale they could retell in later years. It is probable that someone took a photograph or two of the cleanup operations on May 3. Those shots may well be in someone’s family album, unidentified, and a mystery after almost a century.
