• 1864 – A passenger train fell through an open swing bridge into the Richelieu River near present-day Mont-Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, killing as many as 99 people and injuring 100 others in Canada's worst railway accident.

Beloeil train disaster

Tools
Coordinates: 45°32'53"N 73°12'36"W


Photograph of the disaster by A. Bazinet & Co Montreal

Details
Date: June 29, 1864; 160 years ago; 1:20 a.m.
Location: Beloeil, Quebec
Country: Province of Canada
Line: Grand Trunk Railway
Incident type: Swing bridge open
Cause: Signal passed at danger
Statistics
Passengers: 354–475
Deaths: 99
Injured: 100

The Beloeil train disaster occurred on June 29, 1864, at the present-day town of Beloeil, Quebec. A passenger train fell through an open swing bridge into the Richelieu River after the crew failed to obey a stop signal. The widely accepted death toll is 99 people. The disaster remains the worst railway accident in Canadian history.

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Disaster

On June 29, 1864, a Grand Trunk train carrying between 354 and 475 passengers, many of them German and Polish immigrants, was travelling from Quebec City to Montreal. According to his own testimony the engineer in charge of the train, William Burnie, had been born in Glasgow in 1838, immigrated to Montreal at the age of 8, was employed by the Grand Trunk from 1858 onward, and had been promoted to the rank of locomotive engineer on 18 June 1864.

The passengers had arrived in a ship from the city-state of the Free City of Hamburg the previous day. Specialized immigration cars, colonist cars, had not yet been developed for North American immigration, so the passengers were crammed into nine crudely converted box cars and one old passenger car.

At around 1:20 a.m. local time the train was approaching the Belœil Bridge. The sky was clear that night. The swing bridge had been opened to allow the passage of five barges and a steamer ship. A red light 1.6 km (1 mi) ahead of the bridge signalled to the train that the crossing was open and it needed to slow. However, the light was not acknowledged by the conductor, Thomas Finn, or the engineer, William Burnie, and the train continued towards the bridge from the east. Burnie's decision not to stop before the bridge was a violation of the safety laws in Canada East (modern-day Quebec).


Contemporary drawing of the recovery effort, published in The Illustrated London News.

At 1:20 a.m. the train came onto the bridge and fell through the open gap. The engine and eleven coaches fell one after another on top of each other, crushing a barge underneath. The train and barge sank into an area of the river with a depth of 3 metres (10 ft).

The crash killed 99 people aboard and approximately 100 more were injured. Among the dead were Finn and the engine fireman. Burnie was able to escape the wreck with slight injuries. The numismatist Alfred Sandham who was living in Montreal at the time described the scene: "The cars were literally broken to pieces, and between the piers of the bridge lay the sunken vessels covered with the wreckage of the cars, amongst which were entangled the bruised and mangled bodies of the unfortune victims". One witness described the scene: "It seemed as if they had been placed under a press of enormous power and crushed into an unrecognizable mass of splinters and iron, mixed here and there with car wheels in every position, shreds of clothing, loaves of bread, bundles, and human bodies bruised, battered and covered with blood." A journalist from The Montreal Gazette newspaper reported the scene: "A shapeless blue mass of heads and hands and feet protruded among the splinters and framework and gradually resolved itself into a closely packed mass of human beings, all ragged and bloody and dented and dinged from crown to foot with blue bruises."

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