Desjardins Canal Disaster
The Desjardins Canal railway accident took place on March 12, 1857, when a Great Western Railway passenger train plunged through a bridge over the Desjardins Canal, killing around 59. Read more information about the disaster.
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On the afternoon of March 12, 1857, a small Great Western Railway train, consisting of a locomotive and tender, a baggage car, and two first-class coaches, was travelling from Toronto to Hamilton. There were around 95 passengers and 10 crew members aboard. As it approached Hamilton, it reached a switch just north of the Desjardins Canal at 4:10 p.m. In the vicinity of this switch, the axle of the locomotive's right front wheel broke. Passengers began to feel increasingly severe bumping. A few passengers and crew members, seeing the potential for disaster, jumped before reaching the bridge.
When the locomotive reached the bridge, several of its wheels were off the rails, and they chewed through the wooden bridge. The locomotive fell through the weakened floor of the bridge and landed in the frozen Desjardins Canal 50 feet below. The rest of the train followed the locomotive into the 12 foot deep water.
Many people were killed on impact, although several survived the impact only to drown in the icy waters. Many newspapers initially estimated a loss of up to 90 people, although as survivors were accounted for, a final death toll of 59 or 60 was accepted. There were a few prominent names aboard; among the dead were Samuel Zimmerman, a prominent businessman and railway promoter who had successfully lobbied the government to allow trains to proceed across the Desjardins Canal bridge without stopping, and Adam Ferrie, son of Hamilton's first mayor Colin Ferrie. Thomas Clark Street, one of the richest men in Canada, survived.
A coroner's inquest was convened to ascertain the cause of the disaster. The two factors that the inquest focused on were the locomotive and the bridge. As for the locomotive, it was fairly new, and its axles had just been checked in Toronto the day of the disaster. While there was some conflicting testimony about the bridge, the jurors found that the bridge was adequate to the task for which it was designed; it simply hadn't been designed to hold up a derailed locomotive chewing through the timbers.
Based on the technology of the day, there wasn't much that could have been done about the accident. The technology in use at the time was not adequate to detect all metal fatigue in advance; there was no way to prevent an axle breaking from time to time. It was just very bad luck that the breakage occurred just before the train crossed a bridge. At the time, the accident was simply, to use the words of a contemporary newspaper report, "[a]nother of those fearful accidents which human forethought appears inadequate to the task of preventing".
At the time, it was Canada's deadliest railway disaster ever (the only one whose scale was at all comparable took place at Baptiste Creek three years previously). It is still the second-largest railway disaster in Canadian history, after the 1864 accident at Beloeil, Quebec.
Today, the line where the accident occurred is still in use, by Canadian National. The bridge was rebuilt after the accident, and the 1859 abutments are still there, although they now support a more modern bridge. A walking trail goes alongside the canal underneath the bridge, and there is a small interpretive sign near the scene of the accident. There is also a monument in nearby Hamilton Cemetery commemorating the victims of this disaster.
Other Resources:
- Halliday, Hugh. Wreck!: Canada's Worst Railway Accidents
(Toronto: Robin Brass, 1997).
- McIver, Don. End of the Line: The 1857 Train Wreck at the Desjardins Canal Bridge
(Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2013).