Articles from various newspapers, published on the 4th and 5th of January, 1877, after the death of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

From the Evening Gazette, in Port Jervis, NY:

From the Titusville Morning Herald:

From the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern:

An article describing the life and death of the Commodore took up several pages of the New York Times the day after his death is available for download here. (35MB File)

Last week I posted about the Park Avenue Tunnel Wreck in 1902. The engineer of the train involved in that wreck was named John M. Wisker.

I was curious to know the fate of this man after the events of the wreck. He was put on trial for manslaughter for the deaths in the wreck, but was ultimately acquitted. I can only imagine the emotional toll this all took on him. From the start of the whole ordeal, he was blamed for the wreck. Newspapers questioned his experience as an engineer. He was even held in jail for a short time.

This was a gruesome crash. Newspapers described some victims as boiling to death from the steam of the engine. Telescoping is a term that you don’t ever want to hear in a sentence alongside anything having to do with rails. Imagine a collapsible telescope, and how the tubes slide into one another to become smaller. Now imagine the same thing in a rail collision: the force causes the cars to collapse into one another, one car sliding inside the others, resulting in heavy casualties.

In 1903 Wisker’s trial began, and later on that week he himself testified about the unsafe conditions of his locomotive. On April 25th, Wisker was acquitted. The emotional toll on the man was clearly evident as the jury read the verdict. He was described as “on the verge of nervous collapse” and “he trembled so violently that he had to be helped to his feet by [his lawyer]“. “He is but a shadow of the big sturdy fellow who was arrested the day of the fatal collision in the Park avenue tunnel.”

It would be nice to know that this man lived a long and productive life after this ordeal. However, in 1909, a work-related accident claimed John M. Wisker’s life. He was age 40. At least he lived long enough to see the beginnings of electric service, and the start of construction on the new Grand Central, both results of the crash in 1902.

Recently I’ve been having a lot of fun poring over the history of the Harlem Line and trains in the area. I mentioned a few weeks ago a new part of the site called the Historical Archives. When it first opened the Historical Archives had a few timetables, maps and newspaper articles. Now it contains well over a hundred different entries. I must thank the folks at the Research Library at the Danbury Railway Museum because many of the timetables in the Archive come from their collection. I figured that in addition to my normal blogging of current events and craziness, I shall from here forward designate Friday as Historical Archive day, and I will be posting an article about something interesting about this history of the Harlem Line. The navigation at the top of the site changed slightly, in order to accommodate the new category, called History.

To kick it all off, I thought it may be interesting to post about the 1902 Park Avenue Tunnel wreck. Trains today are relatively safe, however in the past there were many dangers, and many people died over the course of history…

Above are just some of the headlines of newspaper articles now in the Historical Archives. On January 8th 1902 the worst train wreck in New York City’s history occurred underground in the Park Avenue Tunnel. The tunnel had originally been built in 1876 to make Manhattan safer by removing the tracks from aboveground. However low visibility in the darkness, and especially the smoke from coal-burning locomotives, made the tunnel quite hazardous. This was not the first wreck in the tunnel: accidents had occurred in 1891, where six people were killed, and 1882, where two people lost their lives.

At first, the engineer John M. Wisker was blamed for the accident. He had missed several signals, and he was controlling the train that slammed into the train in front of it. Ultimately, Wisker was acquitted – the dangers and low visibility in the tunnel was to blame for the crash. Fifteen people died as an immediate result of the crash, and several others died in the hospital shortly after. The deaths, however, were not in vain: they provided the final push for electric service on the line, and led to the replacement of Grand Central Depot. It was reborn as the Grand Central Terminal that we know today, and opened in 1913. The first regular service on the new electrified line ran to White Plains in 1910, an article of which also appears in the archive.

If you are interested in learning more about the Park Avenue Tunnel Wreck of 1902, and the influence on Grand Central, you should certainly check out Grand Central, a part of PBS’s American Experience, which is viewable online.

If you are an astute observer, you may have noticed several weeks ago that a new link appeared over on the right of the site, entitled the Harlem Line Historical Archives. Basically, I thought it would be kind of cool to scan a bunch of my old collected timetables, and to put up my digital collection of timetables (most of them I do not have hard copies of). Now that the collection online has over 40 pieces, mostly timetables, as well as a few maps, I thought I would sort of “announce” it. And now you will notice, there is now an image on the right side of the site referencing the archives.

Anyways, note that this is a work in progress. Currently you can view the archives only by chronological order. In the future I’d like to implement additional features, so you can search the archives by viewing thumbnail images, or by keywords. Keyword searching is only partially implemented, I can keyword entries from the back-end, but as of currently, you can’t really search through the keywords (although some may show up in the tag cloud on the lower right of the site). I suppose it is an interesting challenge for myself, because I’ve already had to write some minor things in PHP to get the collection working as it is (such as the handy previous and next links you get while viewing pages).

Outside of learning a bit of PHP for myself, the other thing I love is looking at all this printed material in chronological order. And the way the timetables have evolved visually over the years, from the New York & Harlem days, to New York Central, Penn Central and beyond. My personal favorites are the two Penn Central timetables above, both from the late 1960′s, with the groovy typography. It would be awesome in the future to acquire a timetable for every year, and to do a timetable evolution video or something. Which just reminded me, if you have any timetables, maps, items of interest that you digital versions of and would like to donate/share/let me use, please let me know… especially if they are from a year that I don’t currently have.

Enter the Harlem Line Historical Archives

PS- I swear, I am working on something really awesome for the site. Another little mini-project. Here is a hint: it is a flash based mini-game. If you do not see it by the end of the week, I urge you to harass me about it, and when the heck I am going to be finishing it.

This timetable was uploaded by usroadman. Clicking it will bring you to the original image, posted on webshots.

This timetable was uploaded by usroadman. Clicking it will bring you to the original image, posted on webshots.

This timetable was uploaded by usroadman. Clicking it will bring you to the original image, posted on webshots.