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Sixty Years After Barreling Through Union Station, GG-1 Locomotive Rusts Away in Baltimore
Somewhere in the food court at Union Station, on a nondescript stretch of tile between the Great Steak and Potato Co. and China Kitchen, a rather smashing piece of D.C. history was made.
In 1953, a massive locomotive—Pennsylvania Railroad GG-1 No. 4876—plowed through the stationmaster's office and main newsstand before crashing through the floor coming to rest on the lower level, where the food court is today. The signs of destruction are long gone, but 60 years later—25 years after its engines gave their last dying hum—the runaway locomotive lies decomposing on a stretch of track in Baltimore.
Train No. 173, the "Federal Express," left Boston late in the evening of January 14, 1953, filled to capacity with passengers destined for the first inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It made a few stops in Rhode Island before arriving in New Haven, Connecticut, where a diesel locomotive was replaced by an electric engine from the New Haven Railroad. Three additional passenger cars were added, bringing the length of the train to 16 cars. After pulling into New York City's Penn Station some 38 minutes behind schedule, the New Haven line's locomotive was swapped for the Pennsylvania Railroad's GG-1 and a fresh crew to drive it to Washington.
The new engineer, Harry Brower, had over 40 years of experience on the PRR. The 65-year-old took the controls, determined to make up the time lost earlier in the route. He piloted the 237-ton locomotive and the cars behind it through the early morning, making stops in Philadelphia and Wilmington, Del., applying the brakes 14 times with no ill effect. By the time he cleared Baltimore, he'd made up several more minutes and set the controls for 80 miles per hour, the maximum speed allowable at the time between D.C. and Baltimore. All the engineer saw for the next 40 miles or so were green lights; he had no reason to apply the brakes until he approached signal No. 1339, some two miles from the route's end.
Nearing Union Station, Brower reduced the throttle and applied his air brakes. Nothing happened—well, almost nothing. The engineer could tell that the brakes on his locomotive and several of the passenger cars had engaged, but the train was barely slowing down. He next dropped sand and applied his emergency brake, a maneuver that should have brought the train to a sudden, jarring stop, but that almost no effect either.
Realizing that he was at the controls of a runaway train, Brower did what he could. He frantically blew his in-cab whistle, alerting his fireman, John W. Moyer, to the brake failure. Moyer opened the horn valve and let out a continuous blast from the GG-1's powerful pneumatic horns, warning all in its path that the train was out of control. Brower tried to reverse the electrical current to the train's twelve massive General Electric motors, but several circuit protection relays prevented him from doing so.
As the train approached "C" tower, the first interchange track about a mile from the station, Harry Ball—the attendant on duty in the tower—knew there was a problem. He'd heard the train's horn bellowing and could now see sparks flying from the wheels of the engine, which were glowing a fiery orange. He couldn't divert the train—making a track switch in those days took upwards of three minutes—so he picked up the phone and called John Feeney in "K" tower, much closer to the station, who immediately called the stationmaster's office.
"There's a runaway coming at you on track 16!", Feeney frantically yelled at the stationmaster. "Get the hell out of there!" The conductors on the train warned the passengers on board to prepare for an "abrupt stop."
In the two minutes between the time that call was made and the time train No. 4876 came to rest in the basement baggage room of the station, the entire concourse—jammed with morning rush hour travelers—was cleared. It's estimated that the 1,300-ton "Federal Express" hit the bumping post at the end of track 16 between 35 and 40 miles per hour.
Smashing through the solid steel safety bumper, the train hurtled through the iron track gate, demolishing half of the stationmaster's office and careening out onto the concrete concourse floor. The floor eventually gave way, and 4876 and two of its sleek, steel passenger cars fell through to the depths below. The time of the accident was 8:38 a.m.; memorialized by the clock torn off off the stationmaster's wall and buried among the wreckage.
Amazingly, no one was killed in the crash, and only 87 were injured. Moments after the wreck, Brower and Moyer emerged unscathed out the locomotive's front window. The engineer turned to his fireman and asked him to fetch his four logbooks from the GG-1. After the impact, a passenger in the rear of the train, which had remained unaffected by the collision, emerged, saying, "That's the roughest stop I have EVER had!"
The cause of the crash was found to be a defect in the placement of an "angle cock," a valve used to distribute air to the braking system of the train. Somewhere between Baltimore and D.C., valve's handle came in contact with the undercarriage of the train, forcing it shut. Because of this, the Federal only ended up with brakes on the locomotive and first three passenger cars; the remaining 13 cars literally pushed the train into the station. The Interstate Commerce Commission's accident report from the incident stated that the wheels on the GG-1 had massive flat spots on them from their extended skid; a rail employee was burned when he touched one of the wheels almost an hour and a half after impact.
Here's where the story of GG-1 No. 4876 gets even more improbable. With less than a week to Eisenhower's inauguration—and President Harry S. Truman scheduled to leave Washington by train—station officials knew they had to do something with the wreckage. Thousands would soon be passing through the station en route to the ceremonies, and the crash had damaged the station and track badly. The temporary solution they came up with was nothing short of a miracle.
After re-tracking the rear portion of the train and removing the two passenger cars that had fallen through to the basement, the PRR locomotive was fully lowered into the baggage room. By the morning of the day after the crash, a wooden floor had been erected over the gaping hole the engine had created, and only a day later the station was fully opened for business. Just four days after the wreck, a special route named for the new president rolled into Track 16, and arriving passengers stepped onto a concourse that showed little evidence it had recently been torn up by a runaway train.
After Eisenhower was sworn in and Washington settled down, the crashed train was cut into three sections, hoisted out of the baggage room and shipped to the Pennsylvania Railroad's engine shop in Altoona, Pa. Improbably, only 10 months after taking an unplanned detour through the concourse floor at Union Station, GG-1 No. 4876 was given a new coat of Tuscan red paint and placed back on the tracks. The Pennsy engine lived out the rest of its days hauling passengers for the PRR and Amtrak before retiring as a New Jersey Transit locomotive in 1983, 44 years after it rolled out of the assembly shed in 1939.
***
I love trains. I was born in Philadelphia, loved 30th Street Station, and counted among my first toys a Brunswick green HO-scale model Pennsy GG-1, which I fearlessly piloted around a large oval of model track which my dad nailed to a plywood board. Shaped in part by the famed designer Raymond Loewy—the man responsible for the Lucky Strike cigarette package, Air Force One's livery and redesigned Coca-Cola bottle—the locomotive was among the fastest and most reliable engines of its time, a masterpiece of industrial design.
And so I was delighted to find one in my backyard, at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore. I took a ride on one of the museum's old steam engines, passing by its restoration facility. About a mile from the museum, we passed a string of 20 or so cars and engines which the museum keeps in storage. Among those was a badly rusted GG-1, its steel body full of holes, its badly mangled twin pantographs reaching for catenary wire no longer there. My heart sunk to see it in such a state.
I scribbled down the number on the side of the locomotive, and a little research led to the story of how that very locomotive had ripped a path through Union Station. I reached out to Dave Shackleford, the curator at the B&O Museum, and asked him how it had ended up there.
Back in the late 1980s, Shackleford told me, the United Railroad Historical Society of New Jersey set aside several retired GG-1s for eventual display. The group contacted the Smithsonian and Amtrak to try and find a home for them—one closer to D.C. "The Smithsonian didn’t have the storage space, “ Shackleford wrote in an email, “and efforts to display it at Union Station were not successful.” By 1992, the society decided on the B&O Museum.
Shackleford arranged for me to photograph the engine, which isn't available for public viewing. I met Zell Olsen, the man tasked with doing the woodwork on most of the museum’s restoration efforts. After snapping a few shots of the exterior of the locomotive, I decided to press my luck. I asked if I could get in it (thus fulfilling a childhood dream of mine), and Zell obliged.
Wandering through the interior of the GG-1, it became evident how badly it has decomposed over the years. The massive transformers were removed years ago, as the oil used to cool them was an environmental hazard. The tracks below were visible through massive holes in the engine floor. All of the windows in the engine were broken out, and the engineer's seat broken from its pedestal. There was trash scattered throughout one of the interior walkways, as someone had clearly been living there; It seemed to me to be beyond repair. I wondered if it was even feasible to cosmetically restore the old train.
"There are no plans to restore the 4876 or open it to the public in the near future," Shackleford wrote. His shop is at capacity and other restoration will come first—for example, the locomotive and rolling stock damaged in the roundhouse roof collapse of 2003. And while 4876's story is unique, it's hardly the only GG-1 in existence. Of the 139 that rolled of the line in Altoona, there are still 16 surviving examples in collections throughout the US, though many of them are in disrepair. (And none of them run.)
"I don't know why you even want to see this one,” Olsen said as I left. “If I wanted to see a GG-1, I'd go see theriveted-body one they have up in Strasburg, [Pa.]." I tried to explain to him that it was a piece of D.C. history, and explained my attachment to the train. He mentioned that it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore the train, and that it is likely well beyond repair. I came away a bit disappointed, but also very aware of the financial realities of running a museum.
Taking one last look at the GG-1, though, I realized that I almost prefer it in its current state. Rusting gracefully into the earth, it shows the wear of some six million miles traveled and the passing of almost 30 years since then. Far from a sterile, fully restored unit, you're forced to use your imagination to bring it back to life. Look closely enough at 4876 and you can almost hear the sound of its horns blowing on a summer night, its headlight lighting up the tracks in front of it—in the same way the tiny incandescent bulb in the front of my model GG-1 lit up the plywood landscape in front of it so many years ago.
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