Cog Railway disaster 40 years ago Monday

By William Marvel

It was 40 years ago that North Conways new rescue squad encountered its first major disaster, responding to an accident on the Cog Railway that killed eight people and injured scores of others. The wreck remains the worst tragedy in the squads history. It was early in the evening of Sept. 17, 1967, that squad members were called from their homes to help with the accident, details of which were sketchy. Bob Hanson, who lived on Pine Street at the time, went to the station with Dana Haley, a neighbor. Haley drove their rescue vehicle, which squad members had extemporized from an International Travelall, and Hanson rode in the front seat with him. Two others rode in the back.Shortly after 5 p.m. that afternoon, one of the Cogs 60-year-old locomotives had derailed at a siding switch as it backed down the mountain, flipping on its side among the rocks below. Cog engines push their cars rather than pull them, and that left the excursion car free to hurtle down the mountain with its 79 passengers. The brakeman tried to arrest their descent, but the grade was too steep for him to brake it manually.The engineer may have tried to pull off on the siding because another train was coming up the track right below them. A head-on collision seemed imminent, but as it plummeted toward the up-bound train the freewheeling excursion car leaped from the tracks, flew 30 feet through the air, and landed on its side.Passengers from the other train came to the rescue first, and their train brought down those victims who had been least injured. A Gorham doctor who happened to be visiting the summit sprinted down the railroad ties to lend a hand. He was soon followed by a state trooper who took the same course.Taking a shortcut at the top of Crawford Notch, the North Conway team arrived at the base station of the Cog to find a flatcar waiting for them. Not knowing what they would find, they took every piece of equipment they could think of from their truck and from the ambulances that were already waiting at the base.As Hanson remembered it, the injured seemed to be strewn from the site of the impact to the point where the car had begun to pick up speed, as though some passengers had jumped from the raised railroad bed to the rocky mountainside. Those people suffered some of the worst injuries, he recalled.A few weeks before, North Conway Rescue had responded to an accident at the Smith-Eastman covered bridge between Redstone and Center Conway, where a family of Canadians on their way to Old Orchard Beach had missed the bridge and landed upside down in the Saco River. All five occupants had drowned, however, and there were no injured victims to treat or extricate. That night on the mountain the rescue squad spent hours removing victims, stabilizing them, splinting their broken bones, and carrying them to a succession of waiting rail cars. North Conway had the only organized rescue squad in the northern part of the state at that time, but volunteers from the ambulances and fire departments worked with them into the night.Eight passengers died, mostly on impact. Estimates of the number injured ranged from 66 to 75, although only 79 people were reportedly riding on the car. The engineer and fireman on the derailed steam locomotive were severely burned, and two more crewmen on the excursion car were hurt. According to news reports at the time, the newest cars on the Cog (which apparently included the ill-fated one) were designed for about 56 occupants, but many passengers from earlier trains evidently crowded onto that one because they thought it was the last train down that day.Hanson remembered that the weather that evening was relatively mild for Mount Washington at that time of year, with temperatures above freezing and little wind. That eased the rescue effort considerably, although it was impeded by a lack of lights. They had some headlamps, Hanson remembered, but little else.Most of the seriously injured were taken to Littleton, some to Berlin, and two to Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover. A few were taken into private homes in the vicinity. The coroner established a makeshift morgue in a Littleton funeral home.Nearly two dozen ambulances eventually arrived at the base station, and a nearby automobile dealer sent some station wagons to be used when those ran out. Barry Hill drove up with the North Conway ambulance.It was near midnight before the last of the injured arrived at the base station, but North Conways rescue squad remained to collect the bodies of the dead. That may have been the worst of the accident for Hanson, who ended up carrying the body of two-year-old Monica Gross, of Brookline, Mass., to the flatcar. His own daughter was about that age at the time, he said recently, and he thought of the incident for months afterward, whenever she would start falling asleep and ask him to carry her to bed.Investigators quickly laid the blame on the switch to the Skyline Spur, at 5,000 feet of elevationor, more accurately, on human error in the failure to throw the switch completely and inspect it for closure. The switch appeared to have been left at least partially open, causing the cog to walk out of its track and tip the engine over.Since then, according to President Wayne Presby of the Mount Washington Valley Railway Company, all but one of the old mechanical switches have been replaced by electrically controlled switches that lock in place, and the sidings themselves have been replaced by passing loops. The engines also have automatic brakes that engage if the cog begins turning too fast. In addition, engineers are now required to make complete stops at each switch while the brakeman dismounts from the car to see that the switch is fully closed.Sept. 17 bears a dubious reputation for tragedy. In 1862 that date became the bloodiest in American history, when as many as 5,000 men were killed outright on the battlefield of Antietam, Md. On the afternoon of that same day, scores of women and children working at the Allegheny Arsenal in Pittsburgh, Pa., died in the explosion of the ammunition laboratory there. Sept. 17 is also the deadliest day in the history of the Cog Railway, and is the worst in the nearly half-century-old record of the North Conway Rescue Squad. Both organizations hope the records hold.Illustrations courtesy of the Mount Washington Observatory.