OVER A PRECIPICE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue 7384, 10 February 1902, Page 4

OVER A PRECIPICE.

TERRIBLE ACCIDENT TO A CANADIAN PACIFIC TRAIN.

Montreal, December 7. A leap of 360 feet sheer down into the foaming water of the Fraser river was taken by the locomotive and part of a freight or goods train on the Canadian Pacific Railway at Lytton, British Columbia, early on Friday morning.

The engineer, named Randall, and the fireman, Pottruff, both married, the latter only three weeks ago, went down with their engine. Ten minutes previously the brakesman had left the locomotive and walked through the train to the van, thus escaping their fate.

The cause of the accident was a landslip, into which the train ran, causing the engine to jplunge over the precipice into the river, taking jive cars with it. The falling debris pinned the following cars in a Bhort cutting, so that the remainder of the long train and the conductor's van containing the crew were saved. , A patrol bad gone over the road an hour previous. The aooident occurred just before dawn at the wildest portion of the mountain section known as, the Devil's Playground, in the Fraser River Canyon, near where the Eraser is joined bj a tributary. The canyon extends from Drynooh, east of Lytton, to near Yale. Here the railway runs along the ledge of the wall of the canyon, with the river hundreds of feet below, and cliffs and mountains towering above.