3 June 2004 The Great Train Wreck of 1927 The crash site is examined by train officials days after the collision between a freight train and a passenger train. According to Margaret Barham of Roblin, people in the Enterprise area are still talking about the train wreck at Dockrill Siding.   It was Sunday, 27 Nov 1927 when the Station Agent at Roblindale, George Barham, (Margaret Barham's husband's grandfather) was notified by the dispatcher that the westbound Number 19 CPR train had left Wilkinson but there had been no sign of it since.   Fearing that some disaster had befallen it, Barham gathered his children into the car and went to search for the errant train.   It didn't take them long to find it. Just north of Enterprise at Dockrill Siding a horrible scene greeted them. Two trains had collided and a number of vehicles and several ambulances were already on the scene.   Cora Reid, former historian and genealogist with the Lennox & Addington County Museum in Napanee, provided some details and the names of contacts to interview for eye witness accounts.   According to those on the scene, the westbound CPR passenger train en route to Toronto had crashed into an eastbound freight train.   The passenger train was nine cars in length. The first car after the locomotive tender was the baggage car, while the third was a colonist car. The coach, made of wood, had been occupied chiefly by Polish and Finnish immigrants, many of whom were headed for western Ontario where they planned to live with relatives.   The force of the impact was so great that the freight train was thrown back 100 feet. Both locomotives were flung to the northeast side of the tracks while the tender of one locomotive landed on the southwest side of the track. Two steel passenger coaches were found standing side by side on the track after the wreck. Fire broke out almost immediately.   The Napanee Express reported, "The dead are Engineer, William Burnett of Smiths Falls, five unidentified foreigners, and an unidentified woman."   The bodies of the deceased were taken to Enterprise. In addition, 33 people were injured. Among those were Fireman Robert Post. His right leg had to be amputated at the knee and his left knee cap was broken. Engineer Bradford suffered a broken shoulder blade.   After a long delay, the uninjured passengers and the injured alike were taken to Toronto via Tichburne.   They arrived in Toronto at 12:40 Monday morning. Some of the injured (nine men, three women and four children) suffering mainly from head injuries, were admitted to Western Hospital.   One of the passengers, George Vandry, a Montreal businessman, was in the dining car about to have his dessert when the collision occurred. Although it tilted dangerously, and cups and saucers went sliding down the aisle, the dining car did not overturn.   The newspaper quoted Vandry as saying, "The first three cars of the express were split wide open. The roof of one had been ripped completely away like a shingle from a house and had been deposited 50 yards away in a field. The tender of the express had gone into a 12-foot ditch. Mail bags were scattered all over the place. Flour from demolished barrels had made the ground about as white as the snow."   Most of the westbound firstclass passengers were able to escape although they were badly shaken up. However, "The colonist car was the scene of great distress. Entire families were divided and mothers and children searched frantically for one another while the shrieks and groans of injured and dying rose above the hissing of steam," reported the Napanee Express.   One young mother was found lying across the Pullman seat breathing heavily and in pain. In her outstretched arms were "two flaxen-haired babies sound asleep and apparently none the worse for the tragedy through which they had passed."   Vandry recalled that the collision was around 2 p.m. and an hour and a quarter elapsed before adequate help arrived.   Fortunately there was a nurse and a doctor on board and although their names were not known they provided "wonderful first aid work," according to CPR officials.   A nurse who was attending the immigrants had great difficulty as few spoke English but, according to the Express, "an Irish woman, also injured, had traveled from the steamer with most of the injured and had learned sufficient of their ways and speech in that short time to aid the relief train people in making their orders understood."   Vandry himself was modest about the aid he had given an eight-year-old boy to free him from a pipe from which steam was escaping, burning the boy.   A couple of the coaches caught fire but the rescuers were able to get it under control with pails from intact coaches and water from the broken pipes of the express engine. The fire was not totally extinguished until the next day.   Dorothy Bell of Tamworth said, "I remember it well. It happened on a Sunday afternoon in 1927. I was in my second year of high school at Tamworth Continuation. Not many of the older boys were at school on Monday as they had gone to see the wreck out of curiosity.   "My father took us over on Tuesday afternoon in his Model T Ford. There was a carload of immigrant children and the smell of the burning bodies and bones was with me for years. I taught school north of Enterprise in later years and people were still talking about it."   That fact was borne out by Bernice Bell who had been talking about the accident just last week. Bell, who was nine-year-old Bernice Black when the accident occurred, remembers hearing a crash and seeing men running up the track.   The crash took place right across the field in front of her family farm. She could hear the crackling of the fire and, "it must have gone on for pretty much a week," Bell recalled.