Ashtabula Train Disaster Documentary Delayed

Production of a documentary about a 19^th century train disaster in Ashtabula has been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The documentary was to have premiered in November but director Len Brown has put completion of the film on hold.

Brown said the film is about 85 percent complete. Some filming was done in a former New York Central passenger station in Jefferson in February 2019 with other scenes filmed on the Strasburg Rail Road in Pennsylvania.

“We still have the Pymatuning Valley Dam, Center Village in Burton, Williamsfield Community Center and Ohio Village in Columbus,” Brown said.

Work on the documentary has been ongoing for nine years.

The disaster occurred Dec. 29, 1876, when the bridge carrying the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern over the Ashtabula River collapsed as the Pacific Express was crossing it.

The train had originated in Buffalo, New York, and was bound for Chicago with through cars from New York.

The official death toll from the disaster is 83, but historians have noted that it could have been as high as 200.

Through This Door Passed . . .

For just over six decades countless numbers of people walked through this door before boarding or after disembarking from passenger trains of the New York Central and a predecessor company, the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern.

It was the latter railroad that built the passenger station in Conneaut in 1900.

Passengers and those seeing them off or picking them up passed through this door for all manner of reasons.

Not all trains stopped here and, in fact, most of them zipped right past. That would have included many trains of  the NYC’s Great Steel Fleet.

The last trains scheduled to stop in Conneaut were the New York to Chicago Iroquois and eastbound No. 222, an unnamed local operating from Chicago to Buffalo, New York.

A sign inside the station says that the last passenger trains stopped here in 1962. Yet the Official Guide of the Railways for April 1963 still shows that Conneaut was a scheduled stop for Nos. 35 and 222.

The trains were scheduled to stop just over an hour apart with No. 35 due in at 11:27 a.m. and No. 222 at 12:53 p.m.

The NYC passenger timetable dated April 28, 1963, does not show Conneaut as a schedule stop for any passenger train.

Today, the LS&MS station is the Conneaut Historical Railroad Museum and will reopen for the season on May 28.

Passenger trains still pass by this station. Amtrak’s Chicago-New York Lake Shore Limited rushes past on what is now the Erie West Subdivision of CSX.

Article and Photographs by Craig Sanders

Day Set to Commemorate 1916 Amherst Wreck

A postcard photo of the 1916 Lake Shore & Michigan Southern wreck in Amherst.

A memorial will be dedicated on March 29 as part of the 100^th anniversary of a Lake Shore & Michigan Southern train wreck that claimed the lives of 27 and injured 47 others in Amherst.

A plaque will be dedicated at 10 a.m. at Sandstone Village of the Amherst Historical Society. The plaque will be placed next to the caboose.

At 11 a.m., flowers will be placed in Crownhill Cemetery, where the remains of four victims are buried.

An open house will be held between 5 to 8 p.m. at the Grange Hall during which information about the wreck will be presented.

Also on hand will be Ray Bottles, the last brakeman to serve on the New York Central’s Twentieth Century Limited. An operating O-gauge model railroad will be on display.

The accident occurred before dawn on March 29, 1916, and involved the Century.

Eastbound passenger train No. 86 had stopped in a fog near the Amherst switch tender’s station. A second section of No. 86 plowed into the rear of the stopped train and many of the fatalities occurred in the rear wooden car of the stopped train.

Shortly thereafter, the westbound Twentieth Century Limited came along and struck the wreckage of the two eastbound trains.

Investigators initially blamed a switch operator and the conductor of the second eastbound train, but eventually said that poor weather conditions and a malfunctioning switch were contributing factors.

The official Interstate Commerce Commission report placed blame for the accident on the engineer of the second section of No. 86, saying that he misunderstood a signal indication to stop either because of technical error or the foggy condition. The report also noted that the second section was traveling very fast at the time of the wreck.

Five bodies were burned beyond recognition and buried in Crownhill Cemetery. However, one of those bodies was later exhumed and identified by the man’s widow.

The other four victims were later named by a newspaper in South Bend, Indiana, but have remain buried in Amherst because of the difficulty of knowing which body is which person.

In the days following the wreck, there were reports that $3,000 in cash and valuables having been taken from the pockets of some victims. Although a grand jury was convened to investigate, no charges were ever filed.

Railroad Heritage Still Visible in Wakeman

 

Trains no longer rattle and roll on the sandstone bridge over the Vermilion River in Wakeman, Ohio, but it remains an impressive looking structure. A recent brush cutting job has opened the view a bit.

Wakeman is a town with just north of 1,000 souls that I’ve passed through numerous times during trips to railfan in Bellevue.

Whenever I’m going through this sleepy little Huron County burg I think of Marty Surdyk because he claims the town is a speed trap run by a cop named Roscoe.

Marty tells anyone who will listen – and a few who won’t – that you better be doing the speed limit when you cross the town line because Roscoe will be watching you.

I don’t know if Marty made that story up or if Wakeman is any more of a speed trap than any other podunk town in America with a police department seeking to raise revenue for the city.

Still, I keep one eye on the speedometer and the other out for Roscoe although I’ve yet to observe him running radar.

Wakeman has caught my eye for another reason. If you are traveling west on U.S. 20 you’ve probably noticed the massive sandstone double-arch bridge over the Vermilion River on the east side of town. It used to carry a railroad.

Near downtown Wakeman sits a railroad freight station and a pair of old-style grain elevators. The linear empty area next to these structures suggests “railroad space.”

Wakeman used to be a railroad town. The Lake Shore & Michigan Southern mainline between Cleveland and Toledo was built through here in 1852-53.

Construction of a more direct route via Sandusky relegated the original LS&MS to branch line status during its New York Central years and on through the end of Penn Central in 1976.

With the formation of Conrail that year, the branch that came off the mainline at Elyria and ran via Oberlin, Wakeman, Norwalk, Bellevue and Fremont before meeting up again with the mainline at Millbury was abandoned and the tracks removed.

Today, parts of that railroad right of way are a hiking and biking trail, although not in Wakeman.

On a recent trip to Bellevue I stopped in Wakeman to document what is left of the town’s railroad infrastructure.

I began with that sandstone arch bridge over the Vermilion River. Winter is a good time to see the bridge because of the lack of foliage.

From outward appearances, the bridge still appears sturdy enough to support contemporary railroad operations.

I’ve seen conflicting reports on when this bridge was built. A website devoted to old bridges says 1853 but a site devoted to abandoned railroads says 1872. Whenever it was built, it is more than a century old and looks good.

There are fences and no trespassing signs at each end of the bridge, but the fences are not that high and would not deter someone determined to walk across the bridge.

I then made my way down Railroad Street, which runs north of the former railroad ROW.

Much of the former ROW remains open and is covered with grass. Whoever pulled up the tracks more than 30 years ago probably scooped up the ballast along with the ties and rails. Whatever was left has sunk into the earth or been covered.

As typically happens over time, nature and man have obliterated the physical appearance of a railroad ROW by moving earth and erecting structures where tracks had been.

In Wakeman, a small park and a building now occupy part of the ROW. But the ROW near the former freight station and the grain elevators remains an open area with the appearance that says “railroad space.”

Nonetheless, it was difficult to determine how many tracks used to be here. There was probably a mainline and one or two sidings to serve the freight station and grain elevators.

Online sources say the passenger station, which resembled the existing depot in Olmsted Falls, was razed in the early 1950s not long after passenger service ended in late 1949.

The sources also say the freight station was built in 1873. It appears to be in decent condition considering its age but doesn’t shown signs of having an apparent use these days. Perhaps it was used for something in the past and was well maintained then.

One of the grain elevators has been repurposed into some sort of meeting center with a grain elevator motif. The other grain facility is still used although I didn’t observe it all that closely to determine for what purpose.

Information that I found online said that in its final years Penn Central had a daily local that passed through Wakeman westbound in early morning and eastbound in late afternoon or early evening.

That train had a lone geep, a transfer caboose and a small number of cars.

Whatever business Penn Central had in Wakeman probably was related to agriculture. The freight house had probably stopped receiving less-than-carload shipments by the early 1960s if not earlier.

I didn’t spend much time in Wakeman. It was already midday and I had business to take care of in Bellevue. Perhaps I’ll make it a point to stop in Wakeman again and study the remaining infrastructure a bit more closely.

Article and Photographs by Craig Sanders

The top of the sandstone bridge that once carried tracks of the New York Central, Penn Central and various other predecessor railroads over the Vermilion River in Wakeman.

The passenger station was demolished more than 50 years ago but the freight station still stands. The path the tracks took through town is apparent in this image although changes to the former ROW make it difficult to tell how many tracks were here.

The wood of the freight station is well weathered. How many people over the past century or so have walked through this door?

It is evident that there used to tracks past the grain elevator complex, but note how the earth had been graded. This is removed the part of the ROW substructure.

One of the town’s grain facilities has been converted into a storage facility and meeting center. It also has received quite a facelift.