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Posted by
andy
on Tue Sep 15 10:07:41 2020
September 15, 1958: A Central RR of New Jersey (CNJ) commuter train travelling from Bay Head to Jersey City did not stop for an open drawbridge spanning Newark Bay (between Elizabeth and Bayonne). Signals and a derail device failed to prevent the train (#3314) from crashing into the water from the open bridge, killing 48 people. One fatality was former New York Yankee player George “Snuffy” Stirnweiss, travelling to his Manhattan office.
The accident’s cause was never officially determined, although the best guess was that the engineer became incapacitated in the cab and the fireman failed to take appropriate action to stop the train. Both died in the accident. The key result was that CNJ was required to install a dead-man device in every locomotive cab, because the locomotive in this crash did not have such a device.
The CNJ’s Newark Bay drawbridge was last used in 1978 and was demolished in the 1980’s.
Link to Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newark_Bay_rail_accident
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