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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.
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