Pictured is a view of the cleanup of the accident showing the steam powered crane in operation.
(By Stephen Kelley from the Peoples Defender, 1981)
Continuing from last week, the old Shimer Trestle was collapsing under the weight of a fully loaded freight train. When engineer Clark of the front steam locomotive NO. 280 realized what was happening, he gave it “full steam ahead”. As a result of the sudden forward thrust of power to the engine’s drive wheels as it was being drawn backwards by the falling coal cars, the coupling between the engine and its tender broke. This caused the engine to rebound an estimated twenty feet and make it to safety on the west end of the trestle.
Engine No. 250, unfortunately did not fare as well. It was pulled backward into the gaping hole in the damaged trestle until it also dropped downward where it landed upright among shattered wooden beams. Meanwhile each coal car, one after another, played follow the leader and continued to drop off the other broken end of the trestle. In all, 25 coal cars, one box car full of brown sugar, two tenders, engine No. 250 and the caboose were piled in mass wreckage at the bottom of the trestle. Amazingly, only one crewman was killed, brakeman Robert Foley of Portsmouth. Four other crewmen were seriously injured but all eventually recovered.
Before the sun reached high noon, hundreds of curious onlookers were at the scene and before the work day was over the N & W had a cleanup crew busy on the wreck area. A temporary section of track was laid from the track bed to down in the hollow beside the wreckage. This permitted the railroad to use a large steam powered crane built on a flatcar to clear away the heavy debris. Virginia negroes were brought in by the N & W from a nearby work site and within a few days the trestle was being rebuilt. In a little over a week after the accident, trains were once again rolling over old Shimer. To illustrate how times have changed, during the time the trestle was out passenger trains still ran regularly on the Cincinnati-Portsmouth line. The trains would park on one end of the damaged trestle and the passengers would walk across the small valley to another train waiting on the other side. It is hard to imagine the American public enduring such “hardship” today.
The Shimer Trestle continued to carry railroad traffic without incident for another fifteen years. It was in the summer of 1917 that the Norfolk & Western finally replaced the structure by building a road fill beside the trestle and relocating the tracks across it.
Thanks for the following individuals for their help with this article: G.H. Broomhall and Mr. Mrs. Lester Wallis, of Hillsboro, and Harry Wamsley, Merle Foster and Harry Johnson Jr of Peebles.
