Trains had run down the lower inclined plane and into the river twice in the history of the Central Railroad. Crews suffering only minor injuries and major embarrassment. It seemed like the boy would survive if he held on. If the train derailed in the upper yard, he might die from the fall or be crushed. The decline in elevation from the bridge at Northeast Station was not so steep of a drop to cause too much of an acceleration. However, the train would stop on its own before entering the upper yards if the engine ran out of steam. Calculating its speed was complicated by the failure of anybody remaining at Northeast Station to count the cars as they passed. Knowing the cars were moving slowly enough for a teenaged boy to climb on one offered encouragement. The whereabouts of Colonel Wyche were unknown at that moment, so the stationmaster ordered the engineer of the freight to give a sustained blast of his whistle. If Wyche were within a half-mile of the depot, he would hear it. The engineer repeated the alarm several times in a minute.
The steady blast of the whistle set Colonel Wyche running out the door. He left the task of explaining to Jane what was happening to the help, if in fact, they knew. Running a block down Rose Street, and then crossing the bridge over the lower inclined plane on First Avenue, he arrived at the stationmaster’s office within two minutes. The appearance of Wyche in a formal coat rather than his somber black vest and a frock coat more befitting of an undertaker, took the stationmaster momentarily by surprise. However, he was quick to launch into a description of the crisis at hand. Remarkably, only twelve minutes had passed since the message from Northeast Station had been received. Still, nothing exactly like this had happened in the long history of the Central Railroad. The few examples of runaway trains had occurred when locomotives had entered the upper yards without reducing speed. Though the potential for runaway engines and cars existed in large sections of the road, it had never happened.
Wyche estimated that if the runaway continued on at eight to ten miles an hour, it would reach the upper yards in forty-five minutes. With nobody to stoke the engine, it would quickly lose steam under normal conditions. But he knew that the topography between the Northeast Bridge and the upper yards was not a smooth decline of elevation. It had been formed by the actions of ancient branches of the river into three distinct terraces. The train would pick up speed traversing each, perhaps entering the upper yards at thirty miles per hour or greater. At such a speed, it could not be sidetracked. On the lower inclined plane, it would rocket into the river, if not derail on the way down. The Colonel then asked the stationmaster to telegraph all the stations on the line, even as far as Orchard, to see if they were missing a yard engine and cars. If so, how many were missing, what cargo they carried along with the weight if known, and had the engine gotten away through negligence, or was it stolen. If stolen, the perpetrator could have stoked the engine to the limit before setting it loose.
When Colonel Wyche arrived at the stationmaster’s office, the runaway train had descended the first terrace, speeding up from the dash of a hunting dog chasing a deer to a horse in full gallop. Edwin could not make out any objects on the landscape in the darkness. That made it difficult to tell how fast the train was moving. Only the sound of the wheels clicking over the track betrayed the acceleration. Now, he regretted his impetuousness. Having climbed the ladder to the top of the car, he groped for the brake wheel. Maybe, he thought, he could slow the train enough to jump safely. On grasping it, he found it rotated freely. Though having no experience with braking cars, his observations of seeing it done suggested that something was amiss. Pulling himself up to the top, he sat straddling the roofwalk. Turning the brake wheel did nothing.
Now, he had to face his fear dead-on without hesitation. Clinging to the roofwalk and scrambling along the ridge of the car on his belly like a lizard, he reached the other end of the car. Feeling about with one hand, he found the top rung of the ladder, and carefully swung vertically. When he found a foothold on a lower rung, he descended to the coupler. Now, the wheels chattered loudly directly beneath him. He had seen brakemen jump the gap between cars on a moving train, but trying to reach the rungs on the ladder on the next car seemed the wiser bet. Holding fast to the rung, he stretched out his arm across the gap. Unsure that the other ladder was within grasp, he hesitated. Then, nature came to his aid. The overcast sky lit up with a distant flash. He saw his mark, and lunged across the gap.
Dangling over the tracks by one arm, his feet quickly found a rung and he scrambled up to the top of the car. Looking westward from his perch at the top of the car, he could see the distant storm brewing. He hoped the rain would not come before he made it safely to the ground. Near the five mile mark, the train began the descent to the second terrace. With the lightning flashes now exposing the landscape, he could tell the train was picking up speed. Luckily, the small engine was losing steam.
Much to Edwin’s dismay, the wheel of the brake on the second boxcar also rotated freely without engaging the brakes. He needed to try the brakes on the third car. This time, he carefully braved the roofwalk upright. Waiting for the lightning to reveal the ladder on the next car, he repeated his lunge across the gap. This time, he performed the feat with greater accuracy. The brakes on this car were like the first two, he had to continue. “The brake on the lead boxcar,” he muttered. If it failed, he would try to stop the engine. His decision to leap across, from roofwalk to roofwalk, over six cars was a gamble with death. Seeing no advantage in keeping his shoes and socks in the task, he quickly removed them. His first leap was an overshot, but he grabbed hold of the brake wheel. Standing upright, he tested the brake and, it did not work. Midway into his walk to the other end of the car, the string of boxcars crossed into the last terrace. The descent was gradual over the last few miles before the upper yards. Edwin could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance.
It did not take long to settle the origin of the runaway train. There was a turnout two miles above Northeast Station near a lumber mill. The yard engine shunted log cars along a spur, and boxcars of dressed lumber to the siding for the daily freight. The mill closed before dark, then a night watchman patrolled the grounds. The sheriff was on his way out to check the mill, but Wyche did not need confirmation to know. The mill had the only yard engine within forty miles of Old Port Depot
After great effort and scrapes with fate, Edwin arrived at the lead boxcar. He could see the glow of the gaslights in the upper yards. This time when he turned the brake wheel, it resisted. As the brakes touched the wheels on the track they began the squeal. The whole train shuttered as coupler struck coupler. The engine strained against the dragging wheels. A sharp flash of lightning lit up the shadowy iron bridge over the creek. He ducked down just in time to clear it. Turning the wheel with all his strength, he could feel the cars slowing as they crossed the bridge. The man stationed at its end could see a spring of sparks flying from the wheels. The ear shattering din of groaning metal and squealing brakes was deafening. When the train entered the upper yards, it was still going too fast to sidetrack. The foreman’s call was to let it continue to the lower inclined plane.
The length of the main track of the upper yards was three city blocks. At its end, before entering the cut of the lower inclined plane, there was the old Union Depot. Here, men were dumping wheelbarrows of lime from the nearby lime shed off the platform onto the track. The mound was about even with the platform. Wyche hoped that it would slow the engine, but knew it could not stop it. He feared that a larger mound might cause a derailment. Then, the pin in the boxcar coupler snapped under the strain, setting free the locomotive and tender.
The locomotive plowed through the mound of lime, and continued down the inclined plane. However, the train of boxcars gradually slowed to a walking pace. Edwin lost his grip on the brake wheel, and slid off the car landing feet first as the car reached the old depot. Then, there was a loud metallic bang. The brakes on the lead car finally failed, and now their descent through the incline plane was unstoppable. The locomotive and tender, still pro
pelled by enough remaining steam, sped up on the inclined plane. As it reached a split in the tracks it was going at such a rate it damaged the frog in the switch. The Colonel watched the terrifying event happen from the bridge over the lower inclined plane. The locomotive and tender barreled out of the inclined plane and shot out on the track running to the company docks. It smashed through the barrier at the track’s end and plunged into the river!
Even with the sound of the hissing freight nearby, the noise from the runaway boxcars echoed through the yards before they emerged into rows of gaslights that lined the lower inclined plane. The cars passed under the First Avenue Bridge. Not knowing that Edwin had fallen off earlier, Colonel Wyche strained his eyes in vain to glimpse the boy. Turning, he saw the cars roll out on the dock, then the hellish sight of the cars smashing and buckling. The stationmaster ran onto the bridge shouting, “The boy is safe! He jumped off at Old Union!”
After learning the foreman of the upper yards had taken Edwin to County Hospital, Colonel Wyche directed Howard Chance to send for the authorities. He ordered guards placed on the wharves to discourage the curious. Despite the rain, they were assembling in the lower yards.
When Edwin fell from the boxcar, he severely damaged his leg. After his heart stopped racing, the cheering men about him tried to bring him to his feet. The pain was so intense that he could not speak. The jubilation ended when the distant sound of the crashing boxcars echoed through the cut. The foreman of the upper yards, seeing Edwin in pain, asked if he needed a doctor. At first acting heroically, the boy claimed to have a twisted ankle, but it soon became obvious that his injury was severe. The foreman called for somebody to fetch the buckboard and a horse from the yard stables. Within a few minutes, he was flat on his back on the buckboard staring up at the sky alit with lightning flashes. Two men seated inside quizzed him about his adventure as they made the three block journey to the hospital. Halfway there, the rain finally came down.
In the quiet entrance hall of the hospital, Doctor Greene napped in a chair. A startlingly bright flash of lightning that lit up the room finally roused him. The clock in the hall read seven-twenty-six. He lit a cigar and walked out on the porch to view the sky. Rarely did anything happen during the night shift at the hospital. When it did, patients arrived with life-threatening injuries or on the verge of death. Patients already in the hospital unexpectedly went into convulsions, uncontrollable fits of coughing or vomiting, or delirium. The local criminals contributed their share of violent wounds after midnight, and often before weekends and holidays.
The volume and nature of nighttime arrivals had changed since the hospital opened in May. Throughout the fall, the most serious had caught measles, diphtheria, and pneumonia. Most of the victims of these diseases were children, and several had died.
Doctor Greene called himself “a student of the night.” He knew its fine details. At four in the morning, the “silent hour” begins. The muffled voices of the nurses stop, and you can hear their footsteps. From the porch, the silence was interrupted occasionally by a breeze rustling the leaves. At five o’clock a damp coolness settled over everything like the harbinger of some biblical pestilence. A night thunderstorm from the remote heights, at the head of Rose Street, is a spectacular display that called the mind to ponder the primeval. Since childhood, Phillip Greene felt comforted by rain falling outside, and almost always slept well when it fell at night. For the few days, however, he hardly slept well. With Judith off on some strange unplanned trip with Colonel Wyche’s daughter, working nights kept his mind busy, but it was difficult not to think about Judith. Still reeling from her revelations about her decades’ long deception about their son, he did not even want to go home. He convinced himself that he and Judith might benefit from some time apart. This night, anticipating the evening would be uneventful, he planned to resume his nap for an hour or two.
Amid the flashes and rumbles that nature provided, the periodic steady blasts of locomotive whistles, and the distinctive crash of railway cars, he forgot about the cigar. The doctor turned his thoughts to a catastrophe. He alerted the nurses on the first floor, went to assemble the entire staff, and roused the equally exhausted Doctor Lowe. A nurse was sent out to the operating room to light the gaslight, and prepare for surgery. When the foreman of the upper yards arrived with a young man stretched out in a buckboard, Doctor Greene expected more within the half-hour.
“Come here, Everett!”
“The young man is the only patient, Doctor Greene!” Foreman Allen called out,
“Edwin Martindale, by the consensus of all who witnessed the wreck, is the hero of the hour!”
“Rather than take him into the hospital, send the boy to the operating room. Can you see to it, Doctor Everett?”
At that moment Doctor Greene noticed, emerging into the now fully lit glare of the porch, the figure of Doctor Lowe.
“How many, Dr. Greene?”
“This boy is the only one. We need to look closely at his leg. From what I can tell, it looks like there are several breaks.”
There was no mistaking the look of concern on the director’s face.
The remaining boxcars on the wharf were upended, piled up, or hanging out over the river. Several cars made it into the river, one submerged, the other nearly under. The sheriff arrived on horseback at eight-twenty-three. After a brief introduction to the evening’s drama, Mr. Chance directed the master mechanic to assist the authorities after the company attorney had finished talking with the captain of the city police. Returning to the stationmaster’s office, Colonel Wyche inquired about the progress of removing the lime from the tracks at the old Union Depot. The sudden downpour had made things messy, but it was safe to send an engine down to the lower inclined plane to help with the removal of crashed cars when the officials had finished their work. The station master then asked whether he could dispatch the evening freight train. After considering the possibility of another attack upon the railroad, the Colonel told the stationmaster to send the train on its run with instructions to the crew to keep on the lookout for anything that was unusual or out of place – no matter how minor it might seem.
Through the good offices of a messenger boy, Colonel Wyche had an umbrella - although a bit late to spare his coat. The Old Port police arrived quickly. Under the supervision of the captain of the police, the men of the lower yards opened each boxcar for inspection. The master mechanic of the shops, brought from the dining room of the Bailey Hotel, examined the cars as they walked down the south wharf. He reported,
“On each car examined, I readily observed that the unique linkage I designed to improve the braking mechanism on the older cars had been rendered inoperable. Besides seeing the flaw in using a pin to connect the linkage rod to the gearbox that transmitted the turn of the brake wheel to the brakes, I know for certain that the design was particular to the company. Only twenty old cars were fitted with this braking system, and they dated to Reconstruction days when the company was replacing wood frame trucks on old cars with iron frames. Though the linkage could be readily defeated, somebody had to know the location of the few remaining cars of this type, and how to render the brakes useless.”
This realization excited the imagination of both superintendent Wyche and the police. The saboteur might be one of their own! Mr. Chance told to the coroner’s jury,
“Only ten cars were assigned together at one location and the rest were dispersed along the line. The saboteur had to be a railroad man.”
Not necessarily. The saboteur – rather, the assassin – was merely mechanically inclined. On opening the third car from the end, they found the body of the right honorable state senator and former soldier of the Confederacy, Captain William P. Grundy Esquire. Grundy! The protector of some ladies, and tormentor of others – the inspiration of the antagonist in Laura’s story. From all that could be observed from the body prior to the arrival of Doctor Lovejoy and Myrtle, he had been alive when he was thrown into the boxcar. The coroner’s report stated,
“This was not so! He had died on the way from a fatal injection. It was a novel twist designed to promote general fear, for he had been speaking on the State Capitol floor only the morning before.”
Colonel Wyche left the office and continued across the bridge, leaving Mr. Chance in charge. The rainfall had dwindled to a light drizzle, though flashes of lightning persisted in the distance. It was now five after nine. On entering the house, the Colonel expressed his apologies for the abrupt departure. Jane would tell the authorities not long after the death of the Colonel,
“I was anxious to learn more about the train crash. The second story balcony at the rear of the house overlooks the depot and the incline plane. It provided me with an ample view of the frantic activity around the depot before and after the crash. From this position I saw my husband standing on the bridge when the cars raced under it and this concerned me. I however, am not a lady to be shaken easily by such things. I disliked waiting to be told what was happening.”
When possible, she preferred to see things as they happened. Now, that she had seen, her mind turned to gaining a full understanding of why it had happened. The rumpled and exhausted Colonel fell limp into an armchair. After asking for a cup of coffee, he set about describing the criminal act against the railroad that had just occurred. Outside the house, Mr. Cassidy watched patiently as the street erupted into chaos. Soon, he would learn that his principal patron was dead; and so he might remain employed he would have to become a real detective. Dr. Lowe noted,
JUDITH GREENE: The Old Port Chronicles, Part 1 Page 10