Bridgeville’s most famous train wreck occurred on April 28, 1907, when a west-bound Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal Railway (WPTR) passenger train “jumped the track” while on the bridge over Chartiers Creek north of town. Fortuitously, three occupied passenger cars came uncoupled during the incident; only the engine, tender, and one empty passenger car went into the Creek. The remaining cars coasted into Bridgeville and came to a stop. The only fatalities were the engineer and the fireman. Because of several unusual factors that prevented injuries to the rest of the crew and the train’s one hundred passengers, its story deserves to be told. Sadly, no country music lyricist has seen fit to compose a ballad commemorating the occasion.
The first factor, of course, is the failure of the coupler. I assumed this was a rare occurrence; upon investigation, however, I learned that this has been a problem from the earliest days and still warrants concern today. Most of us are familiar with the knuckler type configuration which is today’s standard. It apparently had been developed long before 1900 and almost certainly is the type that failed in this incident. One of the most common modes of failure is a rotation of the coupler on one car relative to its partner; exactly what occurred here. The torque resulting from the engine, tender, and first passenger car rolling sideways as they tumbled from the bridge into the creek must have been greater than the coupler could accommodate. Couplers are designed to accept massive pushing or pulling forces; twisting is an entirely different situation. It is indeed fortunate that the remaining three passenger cars were not subjected to this rotation and consequently remained safely on the rails.
Equally fortunate is a schedule change which reduced the normal passenger load from about one hundred and fifty to one hundred. A brief item on page 14 of the April 19, 1907, Pittsburgh Post reports that the WPTR “summer schedule” would go into effect on April 28, and that train number 27 would leave at 9:45 am instead of 10:30. Train number 27, “the Avella Accommodation”, made the run each morning from the Wabash Terminal in downtown Pittsburgh to Avella (thirty seven miles) in one hour and forty five minutes, with twenty one potential stops (including Bridgeville) in between. According to the newspaper accounts of the wreck, “after the train had departed, fully fifty people called at the ticket office for tickets and only then learned they were too late”. The complaints of the disappointed would-be passengers quickly dissipated when news of the wreck reached the terminal.
The engineman, Marion Boyd, and the fireman, Frank McIsaacs, were both killed instantly when the engine plunged forty feet into the creek. Mr. Boyd was well known in Bridgeville, having roomed with James H. Rankin. The bodies of both victims were taken to W. F. Russell’s undertaking rooms in Bridgeville. The number of onlookers in the photograph of the wreck is indicative of the excitement this event created locally.
It would be fun to take a hypothetical run on the route from Pittsburgh to Avella in 1907. We’ll board number 27 at the Pittsburgh Terminal, at the intersection of Liberty Avenue and Stanwix. A magnificent eleven story Beaux-Arts structure, it was demolished in 1954 as part of the construction of Gateway Center. At 9:45 the conductor has closed the doors and the train backs out of the station and across an equally magnificent cantilever bridge over the Monongahela River, through a tunnel in Mount Washington, and onto the main line via a wye. We head west, making a large turn to the left in West End, then enter a long tunnel under Greentree Hill. Exiting the tunnel, we find ourselves in the large Rook classification yard. From Rook we cross over Whiskey Run Hollow (the Parkway West today) on a high trestle, pass under Forsythe Road, and pull up to the Carnegie station, located where Cooks Lane crosses the railroad. From there we cross Hope Hollow on another high trestle, then Greentree Road on an overpass, and finally Chartiers Creek on the Bower Hill trestle. There are flag stops at each point. Now we are high on the Kirwan Heights hillside, skirting the site of the C. P. Mayer Brick Yard. Remembering the wreck, we gingerly cross the bridge over Chartiers Creek, enter Bridgeville, cross Washington Avenue on a rusty girder bridge, and pull up to a stop at the Murray Avenue Station. The only scheduled stop from here to Avella is at Hickory, with flag stops at Sygan, Treveskyn, Gladden, Cecil, Bishop, Venice, and half a dozen more. At 11:30 we are safely in Avella, grateful that we encountered no incidents.
The WPTR fell victim of economic problems during the Panic of 1907 and was reorganized and acquired in 1916 by a new entity, the Pittsburgh and West Virginia Railroad (P & W V), which operated profitably until the late 1950s. In 1964 its assets were leased by the Norfolk and Western Railroad (N & W). In 1990 a new Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad (W & L E) was formed; it acquired the P & W V lease and incorporated it into a new system linking the Great Lakes to the Potomac River. Long after many of its competitors have morphed into hiking/biking trails, profitable railroading is still in existence on the original WPTR tracks.
Until we persuade Willie Nelson to write an appropriate ballad memorializing this event, we’ll “make do” by remembering Marion Boyd and Frank McIsaacs each time a W & L E freight approaches the grade crossing at Mayer Street in Kirwan Heights or the Murray Avenue one in Bridgeville and sounds its Diesel horn. Much of the information for this column, including the original photograph of the wreck, was gleaned from the James Fry collection of railroad documents at the Bridgeville Area Historical Society.