Briefly, around 8:30 the morning of March 17, 1909, an overnight train from Boston with 200 passengers aboard was commencing its final approach into Montreal’s Windsor Station. Suddenly, there was an explosion in the engine car. A broken spring hanger on locomotive No. 2102 caused it to lurch. As a consequence, a driving wheel struck open a plug, causing steam and piping hot water to pour forth from the burst boiler. Severely scalded, both engineer Mark Cunningham and fireman Louis Craig jumped from the fast-moving train in Westmount. Only Craig survived that desperate act.
Oblivious to the unfolding drama in the lead car, Conductor Arthur H. Harvey signalled to the engineer that a passenger wished to disembark at the Westmount Station. There was no response, and the train barrelled past Victoria Avenue at about 85 to 90 kilometres per hour.
With no Casey Jones at the throttle, and with the grade into Windsor Station from Westmount all downhill, the train seemed only to gain speed.
At the last minute, sensing something horribly wrong, brakeman Joseph A. Don activated the emergency air brakes at about Guy Street. This, on its own, was not sufficient to prevent the train from careering out of control into the terminal, easily breaking through the safety buffer at the end of the track, before crashing through the ladies waiting room and finally coming to a halt on the main concourse of the station itself. Part of the immobilized locomotive actually penetrated the southernmost wall of the depot in question, clearly visible to all those curiosity seekers who had gathered at the site.
The result of the accident was truly catastrophic. Mr. W. J. Nixon of 143a Ash Street, Pointe St. Charles, lost his wife and both children — all three meeting death while waiting for him in the ladies’ waiting room, a portion of which was altogether levelled by the force of the violent impact.
In a strange twist of fate, a third child, Elsie Villiers, a survivor of the infamous Hochelaga School fire in February 1907, which cost the lives in of 16 pupils and their heroic teacher, Sarah Maxwell, was killed instantly when hefty debris fell upon her as a consequence of the calamitous collision within that same waiting room. Miss Villiers, 12, was with her grandmother at the time of the accident and, for one reason or another, her body was taken to the Royal Victoria Hospital, where her heart-broken family collected (as was the custom of the day) her badly battered remains.
The fifth fatality was the engineer, Mark Cunningham, who expired a few hours later in the Montreal General Hospital, then located at Dorchester and St. Dominique. Eleven other individuals were gravely injured and, as a result, taken to nearby city hospitals.
Interestingly, until these dismal events of that late winter morning, more 500,000 trains had arrived and departed from that same station since its official opening in February 1889 without the slightest incident. Indeed, the prestigious passenger terminal had been triumphantly expanded only a few years before the 1909 St. Patrick’s Day tragedy and once again a few years after.
Nothing in its glorious history could have foreshadowed such a debacle.
• Robert N. Wilkins is a former Montreal area-high school teacher. He is currently a researcher and writer with the Quebec Family History Society, an anglophone genealogical association based in Pointe Claire. His BLOG is found at www.forgoodmeasure.tk and he can be reached at montreal_1900@hotmail.com
