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A FATAL ACCIDENT
If the Central had any thought of resting on its laurels, it was soon to be disappointed. The new electrics, conceived as part of a monumental response to a tragic accident, soon became - along with their creators, owners, and operators - embroiled in an accident that produced a public outcry of even greater proportion than its predecessor. On February 16, 1907, an evening rush-hour commuter train headed by a pair of the new electrics derailed on a curve near 205th Street in Woodlawn. The last four of the train's five wooden coaches left the tracks completely and overturned, leaving twenty-three dead and another one-hundred fifty injured. The flames of public discontent with railroads needed little fanning from the press, though it received plenty. The New York Times, for example, carried one or more articles on the accident almost daily for the next three weeks. The great struggle by governmental and other reformers to reign in the freewheeling railroads on such matters as unregulated shipping rates and general disregard for public and worker safety had already been given much ink for several years. Barely a month before the Woodlawn accident, the Interstate Commerce Commisssion had launched a hearing on the subject of railroad safety. On January 17 the Times reported that 1276 people had died in New York State alone during the previous fiscal year in train and street railway accidents. Two of the Central's crack passenger trains, the Twentieth Century Limited and the Pacific Express had crashed in 1906. The Century, always on the cutting edge of new speed records, had crashed in 1905 as well. On January 22, 1907, another Central passenger train crashed near Albany, killing seven. The previous November, Central's management had been accused of diffidence in its apparent lack of concern for three track workers killed and mutilated by a passing train. Thus a February 3, 1907, article in the Times would seem in retrospect almost comical for its absurdity were it not for the tragic circumstances. The article carried Central Vice-President W.C. Brown's denunciation of public criticism of railroads as being "a menace to national economy."[21]
----------------------- Given the setting, the investigations into the circumstances surrounding the Woodlawn accident and the subsequent accusations and indictments of people in high places are not surprising. Investigators at the site found broken locomotive wheels, broken rails, and sheared rail spikes along the outer flange of the curve's outer rail. They determined - at least preliminarily - that the locomotive had left the rails before the rest of the train. The rails could be seen to have been pushed from their fastenings, and since the track had been repaired only a week before the accident, the general opinion was that the train was traveling too fast and/or the locomotive was exerting more pressure on the rails than expected. A member of the train crew reportedly estimated the train to be traveling in excess of seventy miles an hour. Further investigation pointed out the crew's need to estimate speeds for lack of a speedometer. In short, the New York Central and its management were held to blame by many for a variety of reasons, including improper training of motormen, improper posting of speeds, faulty design, and so forth. Fingers were pointed at the Electric Traction Commission, the company's board of directors, and other people in senior management. A New York City Grand Jury on March 27 handed down indictments against the railroad company, Vice-President A.H. Smith, and General Superintendent I.A. McCormack. The three were charged with manslaughter in the second degree. As reported in the Street Railway Journal on April 6:
----------------------- Meanwhile, more scientific investigations were made into the effect the new electrics were actually having on the rails. The Journal published abstracts of several studies, all of which found that even at seventy miles an hour (a speed in excess of the limits at the accident site), the worst-case scenario left the spikes with a factor of safety of four just to reach yield stress, approximately seventy percent of their ultimate failure stress. Moreover, subsequent trial runs of a similar train at the Schenectady facilities could find no fault with the locomotive design. The most detailed of the published abstracts was one made by the General Electric Company (GE) and its locomotive-building partner, the American Locomotive Company (Alco).[23] In this study, the engineers compared the new electric locomotive with an Atlantic-type steam locomotive (4-4-2 wheel arrangement) whose single trailing-wheel axle was pedestal-mounted in the locomotive frame. (Radial trailing trucks were not yet in use.) This gave the steam locomotive a rigid wheelbase similar to but somewhat longer than the electric's. In analyzing the stresses on the track a number of variables come into play, such as the speed, the degree of track curvature, the superelevation of the outer rail, the lateral play in the second drive axle with regard to the locomotive frame, the locomotive center of gravity, and the pressure of the pony truck against the outer rail. Calculations were made for all the scenarios that one could reasonably expect. Generally speaking, the calculated stresses on the track were similar for both locomotives, though the electric's lower center of gravity was seen to produce a somewhat greater shearing force on the outer rail. (The higher center of gravity at lower speeds has a tendency to produce a greater downward but lesser outward force on a superelevated outer rail.) As the speed was increased, however, and centrifugal force became the dominant force, the difference became less, then reverse, and finally moot because the steamer would have toppled.[24]
----------------------- One paragraph in the report is particularly noteworthy in light of eventual developments:
----------------------- This consideration probably more than any resulted in the replacement by GE of the single-axle pony trucks with heavier, better tracking double-axle ones (as used in the Atlantic design). It must certainly have led also to GE's use of articulated-frame wheel arrangements in subsequent mainline electrics, including the Central's T-class locomotives of 1913 and their B-B+B-B wheel arrangement. (The original T-class locomotives were redesignated S-class when their pony trucks were converted.) GE's adherence to articulated frames continued with the famous Milwaukee Road 1-B-D-D-B-1 bipolars, and a string of 2-C+C-2 designs beginning with the New York Central subsidiary Cleveland Union Terminal's P-class motors and continuing through the New Haven Railroad's EP3-class, and the Pennsylvania Railroad's famed GG1's. Interestingly, Bruce, writing in 1952, comments on the use of single- and double-axle pony trucks for steam locomotives as follows:
----------------------- Bruce had forty-five years of locomotive-building experience behind him and had been assistant vice-president in charge of engineering and director of steam locomotive engineering at Alco. He must certainly have been aware of the Woodlawn accident and its implications, though he does not refer to it by name. (Note the specific date of 1907 in his comment.) In a nutshell, his statement summarizes the outcome of the accident and its investigation: Nothing was ever proven, charges were eventually dropped, and locomotive designers quickly turned away from single-axle lead trucks for high-speed service.
This is the fourth part of an article written in 1992 for Electric Lines magazine, just before it ceased publishing. |
