Spiked Rails Puts Train In Drink

[Gordon Cook]

How can a tender wheel get a flat? It's neither powered nor braked....

Waiting, waiting......

Uhhh, nail?   

[ALAIN DELASSUS]

Typical with all those spiked rails.

[Bill Piche]

Typical with all those spiked rails.

I know this is very tongue in cheek, but spikes on a railhead can do quite a bit of damage. Here's a couple pics of a wreck that happened in my town when an express doing about 40 hit spikes that some kids put across the railhead. The first picture is taken from the middle of the street that the station is on (it would be about halfway up the car that you can just barely make out the roof of in the 2nd pic).

[ALAIN DELASSUS]

Bill  Thank you for these pics;I can't hardly believe it.

[Ed Lecuyer]

I'm trying to picture how this happened.

Did the vandals/hoodlums place the spikes along the rails in such a way to cause the locomotive to start oscillating?  Then it rocked off the rails into the station?

[Bill Piche]

I'm trying to picture how this happened.

Did the vandals/hoodlums place the spikes along the rails in such a way to cause the locomotive to start oscillating?  Then it rocked off the rails into the station?

The spikes were laid across the rails in line with the ties and the engine hit them at probably 40 mph, which launched the wheels of the loco off the rails and it veered off into the station building. It was all very quick. The engine blew through the wall of the women's waiting room and came to a rest with the pilot against the door to the restroom.

[Steve Smith]

Bill, can you tell us the RR and the town? From the pictures I'd guess that people were injured at the very least.

[Ed Lecuyer]

I did a quick search and came up with Stoughton Mass, on the New Haven.

This link has the pictures that Bill posted, along with several others:
https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search_index%5B%5D=all_fields&query%5B%5D=&search_index%5B%5D=title&query%5B%5D=Stoughton&search_index%5B%5D=subject&query%5B%5D=Railroad+Accidents&op=AND&commit=Search&date_start=&date_end=&search_field=advanced

I could not find a date, or any more details.

[Bill Piche]

The wreck was August 8, 1924 in Stoughton, MA, which is on the old New Haven line that went to New Bedford\Fall River and Newport.

Amazingly nobody was killed. Apparently there was a schedule change for the summer and a local was running ahead of the Newport - Boston express, so there was almost nobody in the station at the time of the crash. The crashed train would run nonstop once north of Taunton MA, hence why it was running so fast through town. The only people in the waiting room had gone to the bathroom minutes before the engine barreled through the wall.

The engine crew and the crossing guards escaped with severe but not fatal injuries, and the station was rebuilt so well you can't tell that anything ever happened to it. It was actually still in use to go inside back when I was in college in the early 2000s, but I think it's been shut for the last decade or so.

[Bill Reidy]

The NHRHTA (nhrhta.org) Shoreliner magazine has covered this wreck:

Volume 18 Issue 2 1987
"Preservationist's Triumph" -- The Stoughton, MA, station is saved from the wrecker's ball. Includes a short history of the station, including the wreck of the Newport Express. 2 pages with photos.

Volume 22 Issue 2 1991
"The Wreck of the Newport Express" -- The story of the August 4, 1924, wreck of the Newport Express, which crashed into the Stoughton station. 3 pages with photos.