Trolley Thursday 10/7/21 - Boston's Summer Street Bridge Disaster

Welcome, foolish mortals, to another October trolleypost! This month, we're doing famous streetcar disasters from all over the United States and our first port of call is, appropriately, a port city. Along Boston's famous Charles River (where you'll find me along with lovers, muggers and thieves) are (currently) nine bridges that guide cars, rapid transit, and commuter trains over the waters to safety on the other side. One of these is the Summer Street bridge, a drawbridge on the southeastern side of Boston's South Station, which once carried the Boston Elevated Railway (or BERy) along with normal automobile traffic. So, what happens when a streetcar tries to cross this bridge when it's all drawn up? You get one soaked trolley, forty-six deaths, and the deadliest accident in Boston before the Cocoanut Grove fire of 1946. Put on your scuba gear and sound the alarm, it's time for Trolley Thursday.

  

The Players

A Boston Elevated Railway tribute PCC car on San Francisco's "Market Street Railway".
(Market Street Railway)

An overhead view of the Summer Street Bridge, looking southeast
of the two sliding sections in an unknown year.
(Historic American Engineering Record)

In this fatal theater, the setting is Boston, Massachusetts, on the night of Tuesday, November 7, 1916. At the time, the BERy was the single largest mass transit company in the city and was running its rival subway system, the West End Railway, under a lease. One of the most important BERy corridors was through South Station, Broadway, and Andrews Square, which mostly served passenger train connections. An elevated line, with its own bridge over the Fort Point Channel next to South Station, was supposed to be constructed as a new transit loop line, but this was never initiated. Instead, the South Station line followed Summer Street into Downtown from City Point, running on the street and over the Summer Street Bridge. The Bridge itself was a "retractable" type, where one section could slide away from the other to create a navigable clearance. The Summer Street Bridge could slide diagonally on both sides, making its operation and mechanicals more compact than a normal draw- or lifting bridge. Due to the lack of visible bridge movement, a small stop-sign and metal gates on either side are used to block traffic. 

A pre-modernized BERy streetcar with open ends, similar to No. 393.
(Boston Public Library)

Motorman Gerald Walsh (left) and
Conductor George McKeon (right).
(Southern Star Irish News)

The streetcar was BERy No. 393, a Brill two-truck streetcar built in 1900. Like many Brill cars of its day, it was a development of their earlier horsecars and had parallel seating inside for about sixty people. The only defining feature of the car was its angled windscreen, great for deflecting snow during Nor'Eastern winters. It had two 50-horsepower motors and only operated as a single car. Car No. 393 was crewed by motorman Gerald Walsh, a young man of 25, and piloted by conductor George McKeon. It was their first night working on the Summer Street Line, but both were familiar to the general area and depended on that experience to get them through the night. At the time, No. 393 was working as an "extra" car, filling a gap in the normal schedule, but there was nothing normal about the night's events. After all, it was an election night, one that saw President Woodrow Wilson serve his second term, and so many tired voters were eager to pile into the cars to enjoy a relaxing ride home. 

A later BERy double-truck streetcar, a larger variant of No. 393's type.
(Vintage Everyday)

The Disaster

The doomed route of Boston Elevated Railway No. 393, as seen
on a 1916 BERy transit map.
(The Boston Globe)

When No. 393 set off north from City Point to South Station at 5:13PM, McKeon and Walsh were bracing for the factory crowds on East First Street, who would pack the car in droves. Car No. 393 soon felt the strain from seventy passengers, its two motors (one per truck) whirring and groaning loudly. The air brakes, which could normally stop a car in about half its own length, cried out with every stop McKeon called, and in the midst of all the hubbub, the passengers merely ignored the sounds of the streetcar to relax. After all, it all sounded normal. After 12 minutes into an otherwise-routine journey, the overloaded little trolley now had to crest the hill overlooking Fort Point Channel. The brakes cried out again as Car 393 descended towards the Fort Point Bridge, Walsh hoping that he didn't have to put the car into "emergency" to stop just before, but the weight of the passengers surged the car forward. Nobody really paid any mind to the trolley car cacophony until suddenly, 393 hit something that neither Walsh, McKeon, nor the passengers ever wanted to see: the closed gates of the Summer Street Bridge.

The gates of the Summer Street bridge, with curious onlookers gathering
on the morning after the incident.
(Boston Globe)

The Summer Street Bridge in an "open" position, as seen
the morning after the incident.
(Boston Globe)

Through the glare of the interior lights bouncing off the windscreen and the flashing lights on the bridge, Walsh quickly saw that the bridge had retracted to allow a boat through. Due to a delayed reaction, Walsh was just a bit too late on hitting the emergency brake and the handbrake, allowing No. 393 to smash through the gates and slide towards the opened bridge. He even tried to throw the streetcar into reverse, hoping the motor polarities would be enough to counteract the momentum. The passengers, unfortunately, had no idea what was going on as they heard the crunch of steel outside the trolley walls; all they could do was hold on as 393 squealed and groaned towards the gap before suddenly bottoming out with a "THUD" as the first truck left the rails and bounced the pole off the wire, shrouding everyone in darkness. No. 393's poor wooden frame was now the only thing holding the trolley in place. The frame hogged, bending upward as the overloaded trolley slid closer and closer to the sparkling waters of Fort Point Channel. And then, in the din of confused voices, someone inside spoke up:

"MY GOD! WE'RE GOING OVER!"

The interior of the 393 after it was dredged from Fort Point Channel.
The upturned and torn seats show how desperate people were
to get out, with some even shattering windows.
(Harvard Medical Library, Boston Globe)

In an instant, Car No. 393 plunged off the edge of the Summer Street Bridge and dropped about 30 feet into the cold Fort Point Channel, sinking immediately. Walsh was able to escape being dunked into the water, along with a handful of passengers, by jumping clear before the streetcar went off the track, his reversing move having kept the car on the track for just a little longer. McKeon, who was still inside the car, was working his way to the back door and had jumped in time, but smacked his head against the roof as it went over and blacked out. Inside the car was bedlam, for as soon as it hit the water, people were hurriedly jamming themselves into the thin sliding doors on either end, hoping to extricate themselves from a watery grave. Alas, the weight of the streetcar, the passengers, and the impossibly-slender entrances dragged them down into the cold Atlantic waters, taking 46 people to their untimely deaths. The tugboat that triggered the bridge opening soon came around to look for survivors. A few bobbed to the surface, no more than 8 according to one eyewitness, but the rest were lost.

Cleanup and Investigation

Crowds gather at the edge of the Summer Street Bridge,
still open, after No. 393 took its fatal plunge.
(David Walsh, Boston Globe)

Clean-up began at 9PM that night under the Hugh Nawn Diving Company, and bodies were recovered from about 10PM to 12:40AM. Many of them were clad in overcoats, which absorbed water like a sponge and made some bodies twice-as-heavy to raise. Despite the late night, many Bostonians (including then-mayor James Michael Curley, who had just been elected) hurried down to the scene to see what they could do. Survivors were pulled aside and given warm blankets and towels and were treated for any injuries, but the scene was made further morbid by the piling of bodies both on the tugboat below and along the bridge. Mayor Curley called both the local Naval Yard and the fireboats to come and assist in pulling bodies. Walsh, who was off to one side, was completely traumatized by the event, babbling to all who could hear him that he had been desperately trying to stop the car and that it had been dark and he couldn't see. A representative of the BERy soon shut him up as reporters scribbled away.

No. 393 sees morning's light under a tarp on a Fort Point Channel Dock.
(Boston Globe)

As the morning wore on, the dead were carted away and one side 
remained open as investigations continued.
(Boston Globe)

By 3:30AM, the wrecking ship "Admiral" pulled up what remained of the waterlogged 393 after all but one body was accounted for. Investigators from the Public Service Commission quickly took to investigating the streetcar and pointed the finger at Walsh for failing to stop at the posted stop-sign before the bridge (though they also noted these signs were quite difficult to see and some bridges often lacked them). The 393, on the other hand, had no faults in its brakes or control system. Walsh went to trial for manslaughter a year later in October 1917, where the bridge operators insisted they had hung red lanterns on the gates to get the streetcar to stop and Walsh was going at an unsafe speed. Some of the surviving passengers agreed with the bridge tenders, with one noting that Walsh had "hastily rolled through a series of stops from A Street until the crash". McKeon, a witness for the trial, rebuffed these claims and stated Walsh was going the recommended speed of 10-15 miles per hour. Walsh, by then a broken man, was acquitted of all manslaughter charges and the BERy was left with its first major incident after over two decades of safe operation.

What Happened Next?

A BERy Route 7 streetcar crosses over another Summer Street Bridge
over the New Haven rail yards in South Boston, 1940.
The area below is now the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, the bridge now gone.
(City of Boston Archives)

An MBTA bus is seen on the modern day Route 7 over the
Summer Street Bridge, June 2017.
(Pi.1415926535)

Despite being acquitted, Gerald Walsh never motored after this. Traumatized by that night, he resigned from the BERy after the trial to work for the "Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company". He then served in World War I and spent time with his family in Ireland before returning to the BERy as a stockroom clerk. He died from a blood clot at age 41 in 1932, forever haunted by the incident. Conductor McKeon continued working with the BERy after, but upon being enlisted as a doughboy in the Army's Yankee Division in 1918, he was killed near the Marne River during a counterattack on German positions in the Champagne Region of France on July 18. Private McKeon's death was not reported until October, when Boston's City Council voted to rename the street next to the P Street carbarn in his honor. Both the street and the carbarn do not exist anymore. As for Car No. 393, it was returned to service but no sane crew wanted to run it due to being "hoodooed" from the accident. It was later rebuilt into a work car and scrapped by the 1930s. The Summer Street Bridge line was bustituted on June 20, 1953, and today the route over the Summer Street Bridge is run on the MBTA "Route 7" from City Point to Otis/Summer. 

  

Thank you for reading today's Trolley post, and watch your step as you alight on the platform. My resources today included the Boston Globe's more personal account of the disaster, another Boston Globe article with more pictures of the morning after, "When Boston Rode the El" by Frank Cheney and Anthony Sammarco, and the photo credits listed in each caption. Also recommended is an Irish Southern Star article focusing on the crew of the 393. The trolley gifs in our posts are made by Brian Clough on his now-defunct "Banks of the Susquehanna" site. On Tuesday, we continue our morbid cross-country journey with a look at New York's infamous Malbone Street Wreck, as featured on "Well There's Your Problem"! For now, you can follow myself or my editor on Twitter, buy a shirt or sticker from our Redbubble stand, or purchase my editor's self-developed board game! It's like Ticket to Ride, but cooler! (and you get to support him through it!) Until next time, ride safe!