Gentle readers, on this evening of a most solemn day, I submit to you the following account:
The Great Pickle Works Wreck
Gloom taunted the August night in 1926 even before the train crashed. Torrential lightning and rainstorms had plagued New York since at least the day before. The train was running 17 minutes late. And, if the power of superstition be respected, it was Friday the 13th.
As the yuppies of the era headed to the East End for a summer weekend escape from the city, the Long Island Rail Road had its most deadly Suffolk County crash in history. The Shelter Island Express plowed into a pickle factory in Calverton.
Six people were killed, including two young children and their mother, in what soon became known as the Great Pickle Works Wreck.
And one death was more horrific than the next. Harold Fish, a stockbroker and a member of an aristocratic New York family, was thrown from the posh parlor car into Golden's Pickle Works and trapped by twisted steel from the wreckage. Tons of salt from damaged barrels on an upper floor poured down on him like sand through an hourglass, smothering him as he yelled for help and struggled to push the salt away from his mouth.
Rescue workers couldn't cut away the steel quickly enough to get him out. Others managed to help another man in a similar position by cupping their hands above his mouth and catching the salt, which was used in the pickle brine, and tossing it aside as rescuers struggled to free him.
LIRR engineer William Squires and fireman John Montgomery were pinned against the boiler in the locomotive's engine room, crushed by tons of coal that tumbled out of the coal tender as the engine fell to its side off the tracks. The steam pipes burst, hitting them with blasts of 600-degree superheated steam.
``When they reached the body of one of the crew, they pulled him out and his legs stayed in the coal pile. He was like a lobster. Steamed,'' said railroad historian Ron Ziel of Water Mill, who has written six books about the Long Island Rail Road.
The wreck happened at 6:08 p.m. Engine No. 214 was leading the two-engine Shelter Island Express to Greenport with more than 350 passengers. The express traveled only on Fridays, taking people to weekend holidays. Accounts say it was traveling from 40 to 70 mph when it jumped a switch leading to the pickle works. The first engine fell to its side, while the second flew toward the factory with the train behind it, news reports said.
The Pullman parlor car, which was called Easter Lily, was directly behind the second engine, and every passenger who died in the wreck had been seated in that luxury car, with its chairs that swiveled and a waiter who served drinks. There was a smoker car and five day coaches on the train as well.
Decades ago, Ziel spoke with witnesses to the wreck, who told him the damaged train looked like a black worm. They said there had been the sound of a tremendous crash, and then dead silence.
The others killed were Mrs. George A. Shuford of Biltmore, N.C., and her two children, George A. Jr., 3, and Dorothy, 1. The two children were crushed in the parlor car wreckage. Their mother was pinned beneath the car for more than six hours, but was awake.
``Patiently and without a whimper Mrs. Shuford lay in the rain until the workmen had cut her free,'' reported The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Workers cut through the steel around her with torches. Before she was extricated, she ate a sandwich and had coffee, The Eagle reported. But six hours after she reached Southampton Hospital, she was dead of internal burns suffered from inhaling steam. She had been assured her children were fine, The New York Times said, and still thought they were at the time of her death.
Shuford, an only child, had been with her parents in the parlor car. She had been visiting them for a couple of weeks. Her father, Charles A. Angell, was the head of a Brooklyn contracting firm and a well-known resident of Shelter Island. With Shuford as well was her maid, who also was pinned in the wreckage and had to have her left leg amputated to get her out.
Pictures from the day of the wreck show the pickle works caved into itself, with the almost comical giant sign shaped like a big, green pickle, still hanging above the attic windows. ``Golden's,'' it said on the pickle.
There were various explanations for the wreck, from tampering with the track switch to its mechanical failure, said Vincent F. Seyfried, a Long Island Rail Road historian. ``Probably no one could really pin it down,'' he said. ``It's tough to reconstruct exactly what happened.''
The most popular theory is that the disaster was caused by a missing cotter pin on the switch. A switch facilitates the movement of the train from one track to another. A nut and bolt fasten the control rod to the switch. The cotter pin keeps the nut from unscrewing and falling off.
In this case, investigators said that the cotter pin had not been replaced, perhaps during maintenance. Investigators surmised that when the first engine passed by the split where the main track divided from a side track leading to the pickle factory, the vibration of the passing locomotive caused the nut to work loose. The second engine then jumped off the main track toward the factory.
``For one lousy little piece of metal that, if stretched out, would have been 4 inches long, those people got killed and they had a terrible wreck,'' Ziel said.
About 300 rescuers worked by floodlights and flashlights and flashes of lightning to help the injured and to try to save the dying. The mud from the storms made their work slow and painstaking, newspapers reported.
The pickle factory was demolished and never reopened. The train locomotives, both more than 20 years old, were hauled to the scrap yard.
There's no sign now that the wreck ever took place. And life goes on.
In 1976, on the 50th anniversary of the Great Pickle Works Wreck, Ziel went to Calverton and hung a black wreath on a telephone poll near where the wreck occurred. And he took a picture as a modern LIRR train -- with the same name, the Shelter Island Express -- passed by his makeshift memorial.
*From Newsday
Some additional thoughts on the subject:
A few weeks ago I rode up River Road in Calverton to look upon the place where the wreck occurred. I think the event is wished to be forgotten by the LIRR, which is understandable. I know Mr. Montgomery's grandson, he hasn't forgotten. His grandfather's oil cans from "the job" are on display at the Greenport RMLI site. A song has been written about the wreck by LI folk artists Glenn Jochum and Rick Hall, it is quite good and very respectful - it tells the story. Glenn and Rick performed it for the first time at RMLI's North Fork Folk Festival at Riverhead in 2007. A young man at the Shoreham-Wading River High School did a report on the wreck for credit at his school. After the report was graded, he gave the photos of the wreck to the Baiting Hollow Congregational Church whose ladies called the RMLI and donated them to us. They became a museum exhibit at Greenport RMLI calling attention to the disaster. An old friend, now passed, told me of how his father put him the family car and raced to the scene of the wreck from Moriches. They got there and he remembered the steam still escaping from the engine/s, the floodlights set up by the firemen working to remove the dead and injured and the arrival of more doctors and nurses dressed in white who went to work in the wreckage. Even at his advanced age, he could remember the horror so vividly. The men and women who passed that awful evening of August 13, 1926 are gone but not forgotten, may they rest in peace. One day, maybe, there will be a roadside historical marker placed there to tell the story, just maybe.
Another thoughtful article from the Shelter Island Historical Society:
http://www.shelter-island.org/summer2005_series/shuford.htmlde Don, n2qhvRMLI
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