The day the Ponce de Leon crashed at Glenmary

Five people were killed, 80 more injured in horrific train derailment

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Remembering the Glenmary train derailment in 1929

Shortly after midnight on Nov. 12, 1929 — a Monday night — the Ponce de Leon screamed north along the Southern Railway’s line between Chattanooga and Cincinnati. The Ponce de Leon was Southern’s most prized passenger train, and on that night was carrying 150 passengers as they headed from Jacksonville to such northern locations as Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and Buffalo. At 12:58 a.m., the train passed the C.W. Tower in Morgan County, running 23 minutes behind schedule. About a half hour later, the train entered a long, gentle curve just south of Glenmary, traveling too fast to make the curve, and derailed. The engine was hurled through the air like a bullet from a gun, spinning through space before landing on its side in Webb Creek at the bottom of an embankment, one of its cars landing on top of it.

Five people were killed in the wreck, including three crew members and two passengers, one of them a 17-year-old boy. One of the crew members was a mail clerk who was working his last shift on the railroad. He had purchased a gas station in his hometown of Nebo, Ky. and was scheduled to be married in just a couple of days. Another of the dead crew members was the engineer, who had not been scheduled to drive the train that night but volunteered to take over at the last minute in Chattanooga after the scheduled engineer was delayed.

Another 80 people were hospitalized with injuries sustained in the accident. A medical train filled with doctors and nurses was hastily put together at Chattanooga and sent up the tracks to assist. Passengers were evacuated from the site of the derailment and sent to hospitals up and down the railroad line.

Railroad investigators determined that excessive speed was the cause of the crash, but were puzzled as to why a veteran engineer who was well-known for being conservative in his approach to the rails, would’ve taken such a risk. They reached the conclusion that something must’ve happened to render him unconscious as the train entered a long, downhill grade entering Glenmary and gathered speed before entering the sweeping turn.

It was the third fatal train accident in Scott County in a span of 14 years. In 1915, one person was killed and four more were killed on the Tennessee Railroad at Winona when a wooden trestle over Buffalo Creek failed and caused an engine to plunge 50 feet into the creek. In 1925, two people had been killed at Helenwood when a passenger train derailed in a low-speed wreck as it was being diverted onto a side track.

Even as the injured at Glenmary were being pulled from the mangled wreckage, railroad crews were on site to begin rebuilding the railroad. It was reopened to rail traffic the very next day.

In 2006, historian Michael O’Neal of Tullahoma, Tenn. — a Scott County native whose specialty is railroad history — wrote about the Ponce de Leon wreck for the FNB Chronicle, which was included as a supplement to the Independent Herald. Following is his story:

The wreck of the Ponce de Leon

By Michael O’Neal

The night of November 11-12, 1929 was cold and gloomy in the Cumberlands; dark clouds hung low over the rugged, sparsely populated mountains and the air was heavy with the threat of rain.

Shortly after midnight near the Scott-Morgan county line the soft, mournful chords of a steam whistle sounded in the distance, tracing the approach of yet another train over Southern Railway’s Cincinnati-Chattanooga line.

Soon the glow of headlight appeared to the south, accompanied by a low rumble that grew steadily louder.

Looming up out of the darkness like some eerie, fire-breathing apparition, the mighty locomotive rushed down the track, the sharp report of its exhaust a continuous blast of thunder — then gone, as it flew past with a great clash and clatter, followed by a long line of brightly-lit coaches in tow.

This was Southern’s crack passenger special, the Ponce de Leon, on its way to Cincinnati with a full load of Northern vacationers returning from sunny Florida. Having left Oakdale far behind, the Ponce de Leon was now winding its way north through the Cumberland Plateau region, deep in the heart of the “Rathole Division” (so-called because of the 27 tunnels — eight of them within 14 miles — located along the 127-mile stretch of track between Danville, Kentucky and Oakdale, Tennessee).

On the head end of Train “No. 2” was engine No. 6472, one of the Southern’s big Ps-4 Class locomotives.

The Ps-4s were the pride of the Southern fleet, the largest and most powerful ever used in regular passenger service in the U.S.; resplendent in their coat of green paint and yellow pinstripe trim, they were widely hailed as the most beautiful locomotives ever built.

Living up to its reputation, No. 6472 was in fine form this night: its running gear was a solid blur of motion, and the miles rolled past with an easy grace under the pounding drive wheels. Behind the engine, the smoke was being laid down in a long, low line over the top of the train.

At the throttle was the experienced hand of Engineer Wilber A. Eiseman, a 25-year veteran of the notorious Rathole Division. The Ponce de Leon was not Eiseman’s regular run, but assigned Engineer W.A. Williams had been delayed by scheduling problems, so he (Eiseman) had stepped in at the last minute to take the train out of Chattanooga.

Across the rocking cab floor from Eiseman, Fireman Ed Grant was bathed in a ruddy glow from the open firebox doors as he worked the inferno within.

Grant was another seasoned engineman; No. 6472 would not be lacking for a good head of steam tonight.

They were running a little late (the result of having to stop at Oakdale to cut in another coach), but both men knew there was ample opportunity to make up the lost time over the road ahead.

Strung out behind the locomotive was a train of 11 cars — mail-baggage cars and an assortment of Pullman coaches and sleepers.

Most of the 150 passengers aboard had long since retired for the night, lulled to sleep by the rhythmic sway of the cars.

In the mail-baggage car the three clerks went about their work, sorting mail under the glare of the electric bulbs overhead.

Further back in the train Conductor B.T. Cahill paused to chat with one of the Negro porters.

As the train flew through the night neither passengers nor the members of the train crew were aware that there was one additional rider aboard the Ponce de Leon this night. Huddled underneath the forward end of the baggage car, striving to maintain his precarious hideaway perch, was 27-year-old Marion Bradshaw.

Bradshaw, an out-of-work cab driver from Cincinnati, had been down south looking for employment. Unsuccessful, he was now hoboing his way home.

He had boarded the Ponce de Leon as it slowly pulled out of the Oakdale yard. Catching the special had been a stroke of good luck; if nobody spotted him, maybe this old teakettle would carry him all the way home.

Certain he would see Cincinnati in the morning, Bradshaw pulled his coat tighter and tried to ignore the cold wind that howled around him.

At 12:58 a.m. (23 minutes behind schedule), the Ponce de Leon had passed C.W. control tower, located in Morgan County between Nemo and Lancing.

The operator inside who watched the train rush by saw nothing unusual about either the condition or speed of No. 2, and penned the fact in his logbook.

Further along the line, as the tracks crossed the Scott-Morgan line, the northbound train entered a gradual downgrade which ended on a wide curve about a mile south of the little coal-mining town of Glenmary.

It was on this curve that disaster struck.

As the fast-moving locomotive hit the curve the outside rail broke loose under the stress and turned over, derailing the engine.

Propelled forward by its terrific momentum, No. 6472 shot straight through the curve and sailed over a 20-foot embankment, crashing into marshy Webb Creek with a ground-shaking, window-rattling roar that awakened residents for miles around.

Destruction quickly followed in the wake of the locomotive’s plunge, as one after another of the coaches tumbled into the ravine.

When the wrenching sounds of torn metal had faded into silence the Ponce de Leon lay in a twisted, scattering heap in the creek.

Slowly the stunned survivors began to pull themselves out of the wreckage. As the passengers later related to investigators, the scene was one of frightening confusion.

Paul Sherman, of Ortonville, Michigan, recalled:

“I was only partly asleep after leaving Oakdale. The first thing I knew I was suddenly aroused. Nearly everyone was asleep in the car. As I started to raise up there was a crash — a blinding flash and the car left the track and plunged down an embankment.

“The engine overturned first and then fell into the creek. The baggage, mail and passenger cars followed.

“Just ahead of us was an empty car. This jumped the track, turned over and rolled down the embankment and up against this our own car fell.

“We didn’t turn all the way over, but the bottom of our car was ripped nearly to pieces. It threw most of the passengers to the front of the coach on leaving the tracks, and then as the car turned on its side most of them fell to the corner in a heap.

“God, it was awful!

“There were groans and screams and prayers. There were cries of those injured and the agonized cry of children for their parents, parents for their children.

“I lit a match and then another, then another. With the help of another passenger, I broke the glass out of one of the under windows. I was the first one to crawl through, and the first thing I stepped in was boiling water — my feet were nearly scalded! Then we piled up cushions to get out on…”

J.M. Frayer of Dayton, Ohio, was thrown through a window when his coach pitched over the embankment. Dazed, he picked himself up and found that except for cuts and bruises, he was unharmed. He remembered:

“Immediately following the crash there was a big blaze where the engine landed.

“It lasted only a minute and then we were thrown into total darkness. There were screams of women and children and groans from the men who were caught in the coaches.

“I got up and went with another passenger to where the engine had fallen. We pulled the engineer from the wreckage. He was dead when we got him out.”

Suddenly, above the chaos came another chilling cry: “There’s another train coming!”

This caused a minor panic, as the wreck victims feared that the approaching southbound train would derail also and come crashing down on them. (Actually, there was no danger since the line through Glenmary was double tracked, and the opposite track on which the second train was riding had not been fouled by the Ponce de Leon‘s derailment).

One of the passengers — he was later found to have a broken ankle — seized a flashlight and hobbled up the tracks, waving it to warn of the danger ahead.

As the local work train rolled through Glenmary, its engineer saw the wildly dancing light in the distance and knew it probably meant trouble; he slowed his engine to a halt.

The train’s conductor, puzzled at the unexpected stop, came forward to see what was happening.

What he found in the ravine brought him back in a hurry. He headed for the Glenmary depot on the run.

Soon the telegraph wires began to crackle as word of the disaster spread to points up and down the line.

Hospitals in Somerset and Chattanooga were alerted; in the latter a train outfitted with medical supplies and staffed by doctors and nurses from the city was quickly put together and dispatched northward to the scene of the wreck.

At Somerset, location of Southern’s primary service facility on the “Rathole,” an emergency work force was hastily assembled and rushed to Glenmary, arriving shortly before dawn.

The rescue force was greeted by the eerie spectacle of dozens of small fires illuminating the twisted wreckage. The injured were huddled around, while others milled about searching for others still trapped in the derailed cars.

With the coming of daylight, the full extent of the Ponce de Leon‘s wreck was visible.

The locomotive had traveled 350 feet from the point of derailment — much of its path through the air — landing on its right side and nearly burying itself in the creek mud.

The baggage car had landed on top of it. Strung out behind the engine the coaches had come to rest in various positions — a few had nosed end-first into the ground while others piled on top of them.

Some of the cars were resting right-side up, while others were upside down or lying on their side.

The last three Pullmans in the train had jumped the track, but bounced to a halt over the crossties before going over the embankment.

Nearly 200 yards of the northbound track had been ripped up in the wreck; trees and telegraph poles along the line of the derailment were snapped off like matchsticks. (Evidence of the terrific impact was scattered everywhere. One coach had struck a large tree head-on and displaced it several feet.)

Perhaps the single most dramatic piece of debris uncovered was the broken locomotive drawbar. This massive steel link, which connected the engine to the rest of the train, had been twisted completely around until it had snapped.

This and other evidence found at the wreck site confirmed one aspect of the wreck that awed investigators termed a “remarkable event”: as the 150-ton locomotive became airborne, it had made an inverted roll through 470 degrees — and one and one-quarter turn in midair — before slamming into the ground. (It was later theorized that the overturned rail had imparted this rotary motion to the engine as it tipped over. One official stated: “The engine was projected into space in precisely the same manner as a bullet leaves the muzzle of a gun.”

Considering the violence of the wreck, railroad officials agreed that the loss of life would have been much greater had the Ponce de Leon been made up of the old-fashioned wooden coaches instead of the newer, all-steel Pullmans.

There had been only four fatalities.

Engineer Eiseman was killed in the rash. Fireman Grant was still breathing when his broken body was finally freed from beneath the locomotive hours after the wreck, but he died shortly after being placed aboard the hospital train.

Mail Clerk Virgil Winstedt was crushed to death when the baggage car slammed into the engine. (Ironically, this was to have been Winstedt’s last day working the railroad; he had just bought his own gas station in his hometown of Nebo, Kentucky, and was going to settle down there. The day he was to have been married, his body was returned to Nebo for burial).

Of course, the hobo Bradshaw never had a chance at all; his mutilated, headless corpse was found near the locomotive tender and was identified only with great difficulty.

One of the more several injured passengers — 17-year-old John Russell of Detroit — died in a Rockwood hospital the day after the wreck, bringing the final death toll to five.

Eighty-one passengers were hurt seriously enough to require hospitalization; the remainder, bruised and shaken, were evacuated from Glenmary and continued their trip home aboard another train.

Even as the injured were being removed from the wreck site, more than 200 Southern Railroad workers were busy rebuilding the northbound track (reopened to traffic the next day), and clearing away the wreckage.

It required the combined efforts of two powerful cranes to pull the battered hulk of No. 6472 out of the creek. It was sent back to Somerset where shop mechanics rebuild the engine and returned it to serve.

No. 6472 was, in fact, one of the last steamers used on the “Rathole Division,” making its last runs in the summer of 1953; it was retired in August and later scrapped.

(NOTE — Over the years a local legend grew up around Glenmary that the wrecked locomotive was left buried in the creek. This was apparently inspired by a number large pieces of the engine — most of the mechanical accessories were ripped off in the crash — which were never salvaged and which undoubtedly still lie buried in the creek. In recent years, members of the Old Smoky Railroad Museum in Knoxville, armed with metal detector, turned up several rusty relics of No. 6472).

Within hours of the Ponce de Leon wreck at Glenmary railroad and federal transportation investigators were on the scene trying to piece together the cause of the accident.

At first it was thought some part of the engine had dragged along the track, but this theory was soon dropped in light of more convincing evidence.

(However, exactly what caused the marks on some forty ties preceding the point of derailment was never explained).

While the immediate cause for the wreck was the overturned rail, the well-maintained track itself was not responsible. Train No. 2 had obviously been moving far too fast to have ever taken the curve at Glenmary.

One official made a few simple calculations which indicated that for the big locomotive to have travelled as far as it did following the derailment, it would have had to have been going at least 90 miles per hour, and probably even faster, judging from its long “flight” path.

And yet the operator at C.W. Tower testified that the train had passed his station at the expected pace of 55-60 miles per hour. What happened in those last few intervening miles to cause the Ponce de Leon to suddenly speed up and run away to its destruction?

Could Engineer Eiseman have simply been trying to make up “lost” time on his schedule? That was not like him .He had a reputation for being an engineer who knew the road, and there was ample opportunity for him to make up time further along the division.

On the other hand, could he have lost control of his train because his brakes failed? The brake system had been tested at Oakdale.

Furthermore, Conductor Cahill and other surviving trainmen said there had been no warning signal that the engineer had lost his brakes. There was no physical evidence found to indicate Eiseman had made any kind of brake application before reaching the curve that he could clearly not make at such speed.

For weeks following the wreck the evidence and testimony was collected and evaluated; in April 1930, the finding was made public.

The unanimous — and expected — conclusion of the accident commission was that the Ponce de Leon had derailed at Glenmary on November 12, 1929, because of excessive speed. The official report summed up with the observation:

“Its speed was much greater than a train could be expected to run in this territory.

“The reputation of the engineman of the derailed train as a conservative, careful runner was beyond question.

“One reasonable conclusion, and only one, consistently accounts for the accident. The engineer must have experienced a temporary lack of consciousness during that fatal interval when the speed of the train was accelerating on the two miles of downgrade which preceded the point of derailment.”

Of course, since neither engineman lived to tell his side of the story, any speculation — official or otherwise — concerning what really happened to the Ponce de Leon that night must forever remain just that. (And so the matter was closed).

Time passed, and with it the wreck of the Ponce de Leon became just another episode in the colorful history of the Cumberland Mountains.

Today it remains a subject for local storytelling sessions, or merely a topic of conversation for the latter-day trainmen who daily pass the fatal curve below Glenmary and recall Will Eiseman’s last wild ride into eternity aboard No. 6472.

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