NARROW ESCAPE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXV, Issue 3263, 5 February 1931, Page 2

NARROW ESCAPE

FARRIER’S TEETH NEARLY WRECK TRAIN.

A farmer’s broken teeth almost wrecked an express train on the Pennsylvania Railway. The train, lurching and swaying for half a mile between Atco and Berlin, New Jersey, came to a halt with its terrified passengers lying in the aisles or hanging frantically to seats and staring at each other to see if they were realty alive.

The train, which started from Philadelphia, arrived with its engine driver and 300 shaken riders telling a tale of one of the most astonishing accidents in raliway history. Only a miracle, they said, saved them from catastrophe. The train, at Bishop’s Bridge Station, crosses the highwaj on a trestle about 14 feet above the road and follows an eight-foot embankment across the fields. Roaring along at a mile a minute, the engine and line of carriages and trucks reached the road at 5 p.m. It suddenly jerked sharply, leaned far to the right and rocked to the left, the right trucks lifted clear of the rails. The train, for half a mile, rocked from side to side, while Fred Smythe, the engine-driver worked frantically to. close down the throttle and bring it to a standstill. The train, after 60 fearful seconds stopped and Smythe, thinking he had hit a heavy object, backed to see the cause. He found the tracks immediately over the road in two S-shaped curves, running from six to eight inches off the line. He could not say how the trucks managed to pass the mangled rails. An investigation was begun at once, and it was learned that that earlier in the afternoon a farmer, driving a heavily-laden truck, crashed the top of his vehicle into the trestle, dislodging some of the ties and bending the rails forward with them. The impact threw his head against the steering wheel, knocking out most of his teeth, that he noticed no one about the crash, but hastened immediately to the nearest dentist". Smythe telephoned the station in Philadelphia to flag other trains and to rush out a repair crew.