The Trestle at Woodbridge

South and west of New York City, the Jersey Meadows stretch desolately. On the flat, salt-soaked tidelands, the reed grass is sharp-edged and bitter, and around its roots, the soot is thick in the spongy soil. Freight trains chuff across the flatlands; across them, too, each day, rumble the gritty, hard-seated trains of the Jersey Central and the prosperous Pennsylvania's Bay Head line, carrying commuters to the trim farms and tidy suburbs of New Jersey's shore towns.

Last week dusk had shrouded the flatlands as the Pennsylvania's 5:10 express (the Broker) pulled out of Jersey City, crowded with standees. Veteran Engineer Joseph Fitzsimmons roared through a light ground fog. Ahead of him lay a spur. It was newly installed, had been opened only that afternoon. It swung gently off to the right, crossed a temporary trestle over an underpass, then paralleled the regular track to allow for construction of a new bridge for the Jersey Turnpike project.

Snapped Like a Whip. The Broker hit the spur at 5:43. The first cars lurched wildly. Just past the trestle, the steam locomotive toppled over on its side. There was a thunderous crash. One after another, the cars smashed ahead, tumbled down the embankment in a tangle of steel, slicing glass and mud--hurling bodies from their sides like maggots.

Said a passenger afterwards: "It felt like a whip being snapped. Newspapers started flying all over the car. The next thing I remember, the car was over on its side. I saw bodies stuffed into the baggage racks." A great cloud of hissing steam, smoke, dust and soot smothered the wreckage. Inside, men and women screamed and struggled. "They were like a bunch of wild animals trying to get out of turned-over cages, clawing and punching each other to get clear," said one of the survivors shakily.

Around the clotted misery of those six mangled cars in a town called Woodbridge--a dormitory for factory workers perched above the marshes--wives, fathers, husbands, sons converged from the neat towns of the Jersey shore. They gathered in numbed and desperate numbers at the entrances of hospitals, tugged at the sleeves of rescue workers, sat in rigid discomfort on the hard chairs in the Sunday-school room of Woodbridge's Methodist Church.

A Yellow Light. This week the ghastly casualty figures were still mounting. There were 84 dead so far, 400 injured in the nation's worst railroad wreck since 115 were killed at Nashville in 1918. For New York commuters, it was the third big wreck in twelve months--32 were killed in a Long Island Rail Road smashup at Rockville Centre last February, 79 in another L.I.R.R. wreck at Richmond Hill.* For the Pennsylvania, it was the second major crash in five months; in September, the Spirit of St. Louis rammed into a stalled troop train near Coshocton, Ohio and killed 33 soldiers.

From a hospital bed in Perth Amboy, bruised and with two broken ribs, Engineer Fitzsimmons talked with the ICC investigators. "I was looking all the time for a yellow light, a yellow light, a yellow light," he chanted with desperate insistency. "That is the custom. One light as you approach. The second light is at the point at which the slow order is effective." Said Fitzsimmons: "Those lights weren't there."

The Pennsylvania insisted that there was nothing wrong with the trestle, that the engineer had disregarded an order to reduce speed before the temporary spur. But the railroad admitted that there had been no signal lights. It was not Pennsylvania practice.

Flourishing a set of the Pennsylvania's own rules requiring warning lights, Assistant County Prosecutor Alex Eber promptly accused the railroad of "criminal negligence," and announced that he would try to indict the Pennsylvania for manslaughter. Snapped Eber: "I don't propose to stand by and permit the Pennsylvania to use the engineer as its scapegoat."

The superintendent of the Pennsylvania's New York division retorted with the callous disavowal of responsibility that commuters had learned to expect from their railroads: "We never intended to put a signal light there at all. We still don't intend to install signal lights at either end of the detour because it's still a temporary project. The railroad makes many . . . changes without notifying the ICC . . . After all, it's our own property."

*After the second Long Island disaster, the Pennsylvania (which is the only stockholder of the bankrupt Long Island) had taken three-quarter-page ads to point out self-righteously that the Long Island had had a perfect safety record for 23 years when the Pennsylvania was running it.

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