Wellington Railway Accident

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Wellington train station before the disaster
Destroyed trains

When railway accident of Wellington died on March 1, 1910 by an avalanche 96 people in two trains in the railway station of Wellington (Washington) in the Cascade Mountains .

requirements

Wellington was a small railroad settlement at the west end of the Cascade Tunnel , high up the Cascade Range. In the summer of 1909 there had been a forest fire above the place, so that the mountainside was almost bare.

At the end of February 1910, during a blizzard in Wellington, it snowed at up to 30 cm an hour continuously for nine days. On the day with the highest precipitation , 3.4 m of snow fell. Under these circumstances, the route could no longer be kept clear even with snow plows and two trains of the Great Northern Railway , both from Spokane to Seattle , a mail train and a passenger train, had to wait for the end of the storm in Wellington station. Most of the passengers and staff stayed in the vehicles of the trains.

the accident

On the evening of February 28, the temperature rose suddenly, the precipitation turned into rain and a thunderstorm broke out. At around 1 a.m. on March 1, a slab of snow broke off above the town, about 800 meters by 400 meters, slid towards the railway systems and tore the trains parked in the station into the Tye River, which flows 50 meters below .

consequences

35 passengers and 58 employees of the railway were killed in the trains, three other railway workers in the station. 23 travelers could still be saved alive from the rubble. Then the recovery work had to be stopped because of the winter weather that set in again. It was not until the end of July, 21 weeks after the accident, that the last bodies could be recovered.

Because of the accident, Wellington was renamed Tye in October 1910 to erase the old name reminding of the accident. At the same time, the Great Northern Railway began to secure the slopes above the railway with avalanche protection structures. In 1929 the railway facilities in Wellington / Tye were abandoned when a deeper, second Cascade tunnel was put into operation.

useful information

A few days later, on March 4, 1910, another avalanche accident occurred further north, in Canada , in which 62 railway workers were killed.

See also

literature

  • Martin Burwash: Vis Major Railroad Men, an Act of God - White Death at Wellington. iUniverse, 2009.
  • Lee Davis: Encyclopedia of Natural Disasters. Headline, 1992.
  • Gary Krist: The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche. Holt, 2007.
  • Cascade Division: A Pictorial Essay of the Burlington Northern and Milwaukee Road in the Washington Cascades. Fox Publications, 1995.
  • T. Gary Sherman: Conquest and Catastrophe. The Triumph and Tragedy of the Great Northern Railway Through Stevens Pass. AuthorHouse, 2004.

Web links

Coordinates: 47 ° 44 ′ 50.5 "  N , 121 ° 7 ′ 38.2"  W.