Extra 1104 - The Story of the Rockport Train Wreck

I can't imagine what it must have been like these people were basically cooked in a train car windows up three o'clock in the morning most of whom were sleeping the rockport train wreck was the deadliest disaster in Warren County history and still is to this day [Music] [Music] I was born and raised just up the road from this site but this is also the site where 50 people died in one of the deadliest train accidents on the East Coast and I didn't even know it until I was 18 this is the story of how a train full of German immigrants in route to Germany were awoken in the dead of the night in a small town dependent on farming with no ambulances no fire department no paved roads and only one working telephone to the heat of steam and the cries of a derailing train [Music] I guess what I'll do is just start to tell you what I know from the beginning [Applause] the people that were on these trains came from the Midwest they were German immigrants and they were going back to Germany on the sabbatical approximately 180 passengers left Chicago bound for Hoboken New Jersey where they would board a ship liner and returned to Germany from Chicago the train traveled to Buffalo in New York where the passengers would be transferred to the Lackawanna Line and proceeded south to Scranton Pennsylvania and then eased to their destination and at this case there was a decision made that unfortunately helped facilitate the the ultimate fatalities from the Delaware Water Gap east in 1925 there were two routes available for the train to take one was the mainline and a little bit across northern New Jersey on what we call the Lackawanna cutoff that was the main route for freight and passengers it was also very congested and so the traffic was very heavy in the early morning hours so when the train got in to Scranton the decision was made to run the train via the old Main Line as it was called by 2:17 a.m. on June 16th extra 11:04 its two coaches and five pullman sleeping cars would make their way through Washington the station before rock board with the flag man later noting that the crew noticed Lightning flashing in the distance it would be eight more minutes before the career would realize this heavy lightning in the distance was a dark omen for the disaster to come as far as what life was like it was for a farming community roots of light industry it was slow-paced even the town of Hackettstown was not a lot going on there was a small town time everything was done mostly by horse and wagon so there weren't many people around with an accident happened [Music] I went to a one-room schoolhouse right there in Rockport which is still there but they have someone had bought and enlarged it made it into a house well it's still there Alfred delica is one of the only current living residents of Rockport that was alive at the time of the train wreck and though he was only three years old at the time he remembers a life of farming by hand driving trucks by the age of twelve and had no electricity this was the 1920s for Rockport Village in Rockport at that time they called it the Rockport sagg in the tracks the tracks went down with a slight grade and then went up to the station in Hackettstown which was some three and a half miles away from this point typically the Train used to speed up to get through the SAG that's why there's a question about how fast the train was going between 50 and 70 miles an hour so the train was barreling down the tracks heading towards Hackettstown and what happened was the day before the wreck the road crew on hazen Road where the accident occurred were doing some grading and back they had all the roads were dirt the night the train came through and based on their running times they were due to come through the western new jersey in the wee hours of the morning midnight 1:00 a.m. 2:00 a.m. there have been a tremendous storm that had come through the area well when that heavy storm came up at Weiss a lot of the dirt and small stones down over the rails of the track of the crossing was that dirt and stones or about oh six to seven inches deep there was a unique set of circumstances that really conspired to bring the fates in against the lack of one and the passengers by 2:25 a.m. on June 16th the train passed Hazen Road which crossed with the tracks in Rockport but it was here that the trains front rails popped off the track with its driving wheels then plowing through the flanges while the metal began to twist and contort itself the Train traveled over 400 feet before it went over on side then the three cars ended up on top and on the side and doing so they had scraped off the steam caps on top of the boiler and the immediate problem with this was that when steam boilers were involved this steam had to find somewhere to go the engine didn't explode but the steam from the engine went up into the cars and literally cooked the people my father and Joe Snider were two of the people that were there about the first and he said it was just just beyond relief that these people were just absolutely cooked you take a hold of their arm to try to help him and his skin would come off in your hand and they screamed and yelled and and begged he and Snider to kill them because they were in such pain I'm talking about the engineer you know he was scalded in there and different people tried to get him out and they didn't have the stomach for it they come out and throwing up and everything and they asked him he could do it so he said well I'll try and he got down in somebody held a basket and they just took the guy oh like it was rice like and picked him up and pieces like and put him in the basket even the funeral director I guess couldn't even he couldn't even do it and everything it was a mess I talked to a couple people who were there when it first happened when they got there it was obviously a total disaster people threw it all over the place and he remembers he's always told me about the sixth or the little blond-haired girl that laid in the ditch near the wreckage and he later looked again at her and she was it was just her head they found a little girl's head and a spring there there's a spring right where the accident was which is still air yet today and this little blond-haired girl's head was floating around in the spring there boy that that was a shock I guess to see something like that the wreck was threatened to only get worse though although extra 1104 blocked the westbound tracks gate tender Henry Knight / in Hackettstown had heard 1104 s whistle as it approached Hazen Road but after noticing the train not coming through Hackett sound he knew something was wrong and stopped a westbound train that would have crashed into the carnage in just a few minutes after the wreck I'm sure it must have been quite a sight because back then there were no flashlights no floodlights no spotlights everything was done with kerosene lanterns and the only telephone in rockport was at the state game farm which is some quarter mile from the crash site other locals were joining immediately and recognized that this horrid site was no match for the village who had no trained doctors or emergency personnel and what made it worse was that the confusion was only amplified by the screams of passengers who could barely if at all speak English which prompted local resident Lyman Gillick to hop in a Model T Ford car and race down the mud roads to Hackettstown luckily when when the accident occurred there was a lumberyard already on fire in Hackettstown at the same exact time fire caught me some all over of course was there to fight that fire the lumber yard being burned down proved to be a blessing in disguise though none of these emergency personnel could imagine how disastrous of a wreck they were running into as Gillick traveled to get help the local residents bravely set aside their own safety at the sight of dozens of people screaming for help with train doors being quickly converted into stretchers and the last three train cars being turned into makeshift hospitals bed sheets and pillowcases were ripped apart to be used as bandages under the instruction of a trained nurse who happened to be on board in one of the rear cars [Music] you the third car was under the supervision of porter oscar daniels who had been with the passengers since chicago as the door to his car opened allowing steam to funnel in daniels ran through the scalding steam to shut it and shield his passengers he succeeded in doing so but fell unconscious from the immense pain that the steam caused him his body would soon be pulled out of the train car but as doctors rushed over to attend to his injuries still alive Daniels ordered them to attend to a seven-year-old girl first and though they obeyed Daniel's would slip unconscious again finally succumbing to his scalding injuries Oscar J Daniels gave up his life to save the lives of countless others [Music] [Music] [Music] as the night went on the number of dead passengers continued to rise emergency personnel began to transport both them and the injured to the nearest hospitals which were still 25 miles away in Easton and Dover the only thing now as I told you I was only three years old the only thing I remember in my own right was several days it was after the wreck they sent a huge crane on the railroad up and picked the engine up and put it back on the tracks and I remember sitting in the field with my father and watching him do that Rockport road from Hackettstown to the train wreck was completely shut down because people would just drive as close to the wreck as they could Park on the side of the road and walk the rest of the way just to get photographs and pictures of the wreck so it was quite the spectacle for back in the day to the shock of many the original death toll was actually quite light newspapers first reported that only one person died as a result of the accident but that number quickly rose and in the coming days jumped from 1 to 7 to 12 to 15 to 25 to 29 to 30 to 36 39 42 43 44 and finally to 50 come the conclusion of the Interstate Commerce Commission report anytime a passenger train derails it's a rare occurrence we see that right now in terms of even in the nation today they're so rare that they they make headline news much the same with what happened on the Lackawanna the newspapers were practically making this spectacle and making the death toll the most important point of the topic when reporting on it the scalding the hanging flesh and the screaming were all made the seem glamorous [Music] those who died weren't numbers though they were people and those who survived never remained unscathed the wreck was even hardly talked about ever again by the locals who were traumatized by it but once the ICC's report was published with the facts of the accident this train wreck had found its way to the back pages of all these papers well the primary reason that it's worth remembering is that a number of people sadly died at this location to memorialize them is something that we as as the distant survivors ought to it's a piece of our history it just intrigued me just to know that this happened in our own backyard it's a piece of history that definitely needs to be secured saved and fought said I kind of drove him crazy in the end you know he could still hear the people screaming and I learned everything it's hard to forget stuff like that the railroad was not the only thing that was damaged severely that that night it was a real disaster that's crazy to think about that imagine being burned alive it's crazy [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: John General

Views: 63,451

Keywords: john general productions, john general, extra 1104, rockport train wreck, hackettstown, new jersey, NJ, locomotives, trains, history, local history, documentary, short documentary, train history, train wreck, 1925, DL&W, delaware lackawanna western, lackawanna, Lackawanna Railroad, railroad

Id: 2kThYPoItfo

Length: 21min 5sec (1265 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 07 2018