Among the dead the evening of May 26, 1901 was the man train officials would blame for the head-on collision between trains that claimed the lives of five people and seriously injured more than 50 on the new Albany & Hudson Railroad’s electric line.
“It was the worst accident in the history of electric railroading,” the Albany (N.Y.) Evening Journal of May 27, 1901 reported.
That morning had started like many others. It had been a busy Sunday with people as far away as New York City riding one of the first electric train lines in the country. Many spent the day at the train company’s brand new resort called Electric Park, located at Kinderhook Lake, in Columbia County, N.Y.
The Albany and Hudson Railroad and Power Company was formed in
1899 with the intent of creating an interurban electric rail line.
Train service began in 1900 and ran from Hudson to Rennselaer, a
distance of 37.2 miles. The company also provided local service in
Hudson and Albany.
Both the train system and the park were run on electricity powered by a combination of steam and hydroelectric generation delivered through a dam and power station on Kinderhook Creek.
The train cars — 53 feet long and weighing 30 tons — used an electrified third rail for power and could reach speeds of up to 50 miles per hour.
That Sunday was a fine spring day and business was brisk for the train company with extra cars added to the regular runs to accommodate the crowds.
John DeWitt Peltz, his wife and their young son boarded the local Albany train on State Street at about 2 p.m., connecting to the southbound train in Rennselaer. They were glad to have made it on, as there were a number of people who couldn’t find room and had to wait for the next train.
“They will probably now consider themselves lucky for not obtaining seats,” Peltz later mused.
At 3:17 p.m. train number 22 left Rensselaer two minutes behind schedule and would eventually carry 83 passengers that afternoon. Three minutes later a northbound train, the number 19 — originating from Hudson — left Kinderhook Lake, 20 minutes behind its regular departure time. At the time of the crash there were 20 passengers aboard.
At the controls of the no. 22 was Frank Smith, a North Chatham resident and recent widower. Charles T. Johnson, a 34-year-old from Clinton Heights, was conductor.
They chugged south, stopping in East Greenbush for a few minutes before leaving the station at 3:44 p.m., now 17 minutes behind schedule.
Meanwhile, the no. 19 pulled out of the Nassau station at 3:40 p.m., 25 minutes behind schedule.
The no. 22 should have pulled off the main line at the No. 69 siding, located 1.3 miles south of East Greenbush, to allow the northbound no. 19 to pass. That didn’t happen.
Five hundred feet south of the siding, on a wide and dangerous curve, the two trains collided head-on, with the impact so sudden that neither motormen had time to apply the brakes. The no. 22 was traveling at about 45 miles per hour, the no. 19 at 25.
Peltz flew over a half-dozen seats, his son Jack in his arms, and landed in the aisle. His wife also flew through the air. The train car, he saw after gaining his footing, was a seething mass of bodies. Peltz managed to get outside with his family.
“I saw the two motormen lying side by side, dead.” He later recalled. One, said Peltz, had been cut in half by the collision. Further on, he saw two women lying in a ditch; one was dead and the other unconscious. A third woman stood over them crying. The women had come from Albany and were on their way to visit the graves of relatives.
“Fully 120 men, women and children formed a struggling, shrieking pyramid framed with blood, detached portions of human bodies and the wreckage of cars,” the Brooklyn Eagle reported the next day. The number of people was actually less than that, but never the less, it was a gruesome scene.
Another witness said the two train cars had turned to splinters, with debris thrown 75 feet in all directions. The trains’ heavy axles lay halfway off the tracks, useless and twisted.
The injured were dragged to a fence near the north side of the wreck and those who were less badly hurt provided comfort and aid to the more seriously injured. One of the conductors telephoned for help and soon two doctors arrived, one from Rensselaer, the other from Valatie.
The state report, published the next year, listed the names of the dead and gave an accounting of the wounds suffered by the other passengers, which included numerous broken bones, internal injuries and one poor woman who had the skin from her face scraped off.
At least one report indicated that the accident might have been due to the company running two cars on one time schedule to accommodate the heavy Sunday travel.
The company, probably with the old adage “dead men tell no tales” at the forefront of their minds, firmly laid the blame at the feet of Smith. A state government report would corroborate the company’s version of events.
Newspapermen and others speculated that Smith, “practically insane” with grief over the loss of his wife, was demented at the time of the crash.
Johnson, the conductor of no. 22, was also blamed for the tragedy because as the conductor he was in charge of overseeing the running of the train. He told officials he signaled Smith to stop at the switch, but that the motorman ignored him and continued barreling south.
Johnson was arrested and charged with manslaughter by the Rennselaer District Attorney’s Office, but the train company backed Johnson’s story. It was unclear what became of the charges.
Those who were killed included Smith; William Nicholas, the motorman from train no. 19; Rose Mooney a domestic servant from Stuyvesant Landing; Maude Kellogg, a 20-year-old from Ballston, N. Y.; and David Mahoney, a 60-year-old Brooklyn man who had been second mate on a Hudson River day liner. He later died in the hospital from his wounds.
The state made recommendations, including putting a steering mechanism and brakes at the back of the car where the conductors were stationed, to prevent this type of accident from happening again, but a little more than a year later, on Aug. 2, 1902, there was another accident on the system that killed two and injured 61.
It wasn’t long after the second crash that the company reorganized as the Albany and Hudson Railroad and again reorganized as the Albany Southern Railroad in 1909.
The electric train’s final run was made in December 1929.
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