Eyewitness: 1941 Saboteurs never found in deadly train disaster
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Five people died when this Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train derailed near Baden in 1941.
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Federal investigators joined those from the Pennsylvania Railroad and state police in efforts to find out who caused a train derailment northwest of Pittsburgh that killed five people on March 16, 1941.
The fast-moving passenger train from Cleveland, called the Buckeye, derailed near Baden during a snowstorm 70 years ago. Three of its coaches toppled at least 40 feet over an embankment and into the Ohio River. One coach was half-submerged on its side in the icy water, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported the next morning.
The accident happened about 9:15 p.m. Within two hours, railroad officials announced that the cause was sabotage. Railroad Vice President E.W. Smith told reporters that all the spikes holding down one rail had been removed, as were the bolts on the "splice bar" that linked that rail to its neighbor.
Whoever vandalized the track was clever. While the loose rail had been lifted and moved to the side, a "bond wire," which should have signaled a problem with the rail, had been stretched but not broken.
Even with five dead and 110 injured, officials said the disaster could have been worse. "Eighteen minutes before the Cleveland train left the rails, the crack Manhattan Limited, which clips off 74 miles per hour in the Baden stretch, passed the spot without mishap," the newspaper reported. "Railroad officials believed ... that the rail removal was intended to wreck the Manhattan Limited and was not sufficiently completed to do the job before it whistled by."
Post-Gazette reporter Anna Jane Phillips talked to hospitalized survivors of the wreck for the March 18 edition of the newspaper. She found many heroes among the passengers.
First Published April 3, 2011 12:00 am
