Rochester and State Line Railroad - Accidents

Accidents

Only paper railroads never have accidents, and the Rochester and State Line Railroad was no paper tiger. Some of the accident accounts surviving to this day leave much unsaid, such as the 13 June 1878 report that Locomotive No 7 ran over two cows between Salamanca and Gainesville on its very first trip. Others are frighteningly graphic (by today's tame standards) and could have been taken from cheap Hollywood scripts. Case in point: on or about 29 January 1879, Train No 2 departed Salamanca headed for Ellicottville when its encounter with a washout tossed the locomotive into the water. The fireman managed to escape the wreckage, but the engineer was caught by one foot trapped between the reversing lever and the firebox. He desperately struggled to keep his head above water and to avoid a stream of very hot water coming from a burst pipe in the cab. By the time he was rescued hours later, the water had risen to his chin.

In another story that might have come from the Keystone Kops, had it not taken the ex-cop's life, a policeman-turned-brakeman fell off a train in 1879 and was found only after the crew discovered him missing and went back along the line to find him. 1879 proved a costly year for three carriage riders in Mumford who strayed in front of an on-coming train at the Brown Cut, west of the hamlet. The driver of the carriage claimed not to have seen the train until too late; when he whipped the horse ahead to avoid it, the horse cleared the tracks but the carriage did not. He suffered serious injury; one young woman was caught on the pilot and carried halfway to the Spring Creek bridge before the train stopped. She survived, essentially uninjured. The second young woman was thrown seven yards by the impact of the 20 mile an hour train and died in minutes from massive head trauma.

In the days of primitive signals, or none at all, collisions often occurred. The heavy fogs of Cattaraugus Valley frequently overcame the feeble lights on cabooses, and faster trains ran into slower ones. On 26 August 1879, a coupler failed on an oil train three miles north of Salamanca, breaking the train in two. The latter half rolled to a stop, shortly whereafter the next train smashed into it. The brakeman on the stopped cars died, and the engineer of the second train escaped with serious injuries.

On bad days, the collisions were head-on, when one train would take a single track from which another had not yet cleared. The structural weaknesses of the rolling stock of the day led to trains breaking in two. A coupler might fail on a car in the middle of the train, and - as this was before the automatic brakes used today - one half of the train would chart its own course. Given the wrong terrain, this sometimes sent a string of cars rolling backward downhill out of control, with predictable results.