CHILDS, June 20, 1890 — Just after two o’clock in the morning the overnight Baltimore & Ohio Express Train, No. 114, bound for New York hurtled across Cecil County. As the engine, baggage car, and two Pullman sleepers neared the Childs Station, it was going full speed, the throttle opened up to 55 miles an hour.
Seconds after passing the dark station, the engine rushed onto the high bridge that spans Blue Ball Road. There the connecting rod on the left drive wheel of the locomotive broke, the one end flying up and demolishing the part of the cab where Fireman John McNamara of Philadelphia was sitting.
The rod struck the railroader, hurtling him from the cab to the roadside. Instantly killed, his skull was fractured, and both arms were broken. Engineer J. P. Fitzgerald applied the airbrake, reversed the engine, and escaped injury by jumping behind the firebox.
In the first Pullman, seventeen passengers were asleep when the heavy car hurled down the fifty-foot embankment with a terrifying, shuddering jolt and bang. The heavy coach broke into two fragments as the sound of twisting metal filled the air, striking against a stone abutment.
Crawling out of the break created by the impact, all the passengers were more or less injured. Chief Engineer Charles Ackenheil of the Staten Island Railroad was aboard this car, and he was thrown into the roadway, where he was found unconscious in a pool of blood. He was put on a train for Philadelphia but died before reaching there. The wonder is how anyone could have escaped instant death, the Cecil Whig remarked.
The second sleeper left the tracks too and went over the bank at the edge of the bridge. Sliding down the side of the steep hill, none of its passengers were injured. It came to rest within ten feet of the residence of Pierson Matthews, where the wounded passengers were initially taken.
Not realizing that the rear coaches had toppled off the high bridge at Blue Ball Road, Engineer Fitzgerald grabbed a lantern and started to search for his fireman. But to his horror, he found that the two passenger cars had toppled some distance down the steep drop. About the same time Conductor Robertson rushed back to the Childs Station to telegraph Philadelphia for urgently needed assistance. There a special train with surgeons was assembled and rushed to the scene to render medical aid. The injured were then moved to that City.
The wreck crew worked all night and early the next morning the track had been cleared and rail service was resumed. But the Blue Ball Road traffic was still suspended by the debris that filled the gap between the rocks. Coroner Litzenberg summoned a jury with Daniel Harvey as foreman, which rendered a verdict in the case of McNamara in accordance with the facts and exonerated the road from censure.
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Source: Cecil Whig, June 21, 1890
