This was the train that never made it into Parkesburg.
In the predawn hours of August 20, 1962 (when I was four months old), an eastbound freight train left Enola and received train orders at the "COLA" tower in Columbia to travel through the cross-over east of Quarryville on the Atglen & Susquehanna Branch (the "Low Grade") and continue east on the westbound track (the eastbound was closed for repairs), at a speed of 6 miles per hour and dropping lit flares every quarter-mile until it reached Parkesburg, where it would switch back over to the eastbound tracks again.
This was underway when a second freight following it went through the cross-overs and accelerated back up to 60 MPH, in defiance of their train orders. It caught up with the first train, slamming into the caboose of it behind Brown's Food Market in Atglen, killing the brakeman of the first train and the engineer of the one shown here on that foggy morning.
Both trains derailed and the clean-up was delayed due to a car in the first train hauling enriched uranium fuel enroute to Groton, Connecticut to power the nuclear submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus.
A long-time resident of Atglen told me she never heard a louder crash in her entire life than the one heard when these trains collided.
This photo was taken the following morning in Columbia, Penna., after the PRR towed the demolished train backwards from Atglen to Columbia for the investigation into the collision to be done.
The locomotives were P5a's built in 1928.
1 comment:
That's a piece of history (spilled uranium a couple hundred feet from my childhood home?) that I'm not sure I wanted to know ... maybe this explains how I developed my comic book like superpowers of fast healing : ) And, maybe it explains why my dad glows in the dark at night.
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