Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 97, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 August 1899 — PLUNGED TO DEATH. [ARTICLE]

PLUNGED TO DEATH.

TROLLEY CAR DISASTER NEAR BRIDGEPORT, CONN. Hurled from a Trestle and Fifty Feet Down a Ravine—Thirty-five Pereone Killed and Twelve Injured—No One on Board Escapes. Forty-three passengers on a trolley car on the Shelton street railway were dashed down a ravine at Peck’s mill stream, five miles from Bridgeport, Conn., at 3:13 Sunday afternoon. Twenty-six were . killed outright and two died at the hospital. Over Peck's mill stream is an iron bridge 650 feet long. The distance from the top of the structure to the bed of the stream is fifty feet All of the water was drawn off a few months ago to permit the buttresses for the bridge to be laid. The street railway line was opened to the public the previous Thursday for the first time. The car jumped the rails on the trestle over the stream and plunged down the embankment fifty feet below, where it was buried in the mud. The motorman, George Hamilton, saved himself from death by jumping on the trestle as the car plunged into the abyss. The alarm was given and hundreds tof farmers from the vicinity were soon on •the scene. Other cars that were following the fatal one arrived, and in a short time hundreds of volunteers were at work. The work was retarded owing to the difficulty of gaining a secure foot passage in the narrow ravine. Farmers and their wives and daughters came with blankets and woolens, and all of the physicians in Bridgeport and Stratford who were available were summoned. The ,car was soon separated, the bottom portion being lifted off. The top wai buried several feet in the mud and the bodies of the dead and dying were strewn about. The seats were smashed to splinters. Strange to say, few of the bodies were badly mangled. All of the persons killed sustained fractured skulls. John aqd Daniel Galvin of Ansonia, as far as is known at present, were the only ones except Motorman Hamilton who escaped being hurled into the ravine. They were on the rear end of the car, and when it left the rails they took no chances, but jumped and landed safely on the trestle. The cause of the accident is uncertain. The car is too badly wrecked to give an indication of possible defects of its wheels. South of the trestle is quite an incline, on which the car ran down at a very high rate of speed. After it ran on to the trestle for about ten feet the trucks left the rails and the car continued on the ties for about seventy-five feet, when it went off the trestle and dropped into the ravine below, overturning completely and up-ending. When the car struck, the motor, which weighed four tons, aiyl the heavy trucks crushed into it, instantly killing many of the passengers.