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THE JOURNEY BEGINS
The Turcottes found four seats together in the last coach of the Sunday Evening Special, the train they were taking home to Ottawa from their Christmas celebrations in Petawawa.
Maurice Turcotte, his wife Cecile and their two children, five-year-old Bernie and eight-month-old Denyse, had spent the holidays with Maurice’s mother, Clara, who had never before seen her grandchildren in person.
It was Dec. 27, 1942, and the following morning, a Monday, Maurice was expected back at work, installing telephones for Bell.
Bernie Turcotte was five years old when he survived the Almonte train wreck of December 1942. His 8-month-old sister, Denyse, was killed in the accident.
Over the next few hours, as it stopped in such communities as Renfrew, Arnprior, Pakenham and Almonte, the 10 wooden passenger cars of Canadian Pacific Railway train No. 550 filled to overflowing with passengers, most returning home to Ottawa from their holidays in the Valley.
Despite the cramped quarters, the mood was festive.
The train left Petawawa on time, at 5:35 p.m. Outside, a mixture of rain, sleet and snow fell, making progress difficult for the engine, a 34-year-old locomotive known, somewhat less than affectionately, as the “cantankerous old hog.”
Denyse Turcotte, shown here four months before the Almonte train wreck, was eight months old when the accident claimed her life. (Photo courtesy of Bernie Turcotte)
It normally hauled five cars or fewer but, with the added demands of the Christmas season, was being pressed into far more taxing service. A leak in the boiler made it increasingly difficult to maintain pressure, which, coupled with the icy tracks and heavy load, conspired to keep the train slow and late.
Normally, this would have been a bearable inconvenience for the train’s passengers and crew. On this night, however, it proved disastrous, as a faster, larger locomotive bore down on it from behind.
THE TROOP TRAIN
Passenger Extra 2802 East was carrying soldiers and other military personnel from Red Deer, Alta., to Halifax, where they would deploy overseas to Europe’s theatre of war. Hurtling through the night, its engine, caboose and 13 metal coaches weighed more than 1,000 tons.
After 32 years working on freight trains, Smiths Falls native Lorne Richardson was making his inaugural run as engineer of a passenger train. Sixty-four-year-old conductor John Howard, meanwhile, also a Smiths Falls resident, had been a CPR conductor since 1911, five years after he joined the company as a porter. He had another year to go before retirement.
Richardson, Howard and the rest of the crew of 2802 knew the 550 was ahead of them. They’d been given orders to keep a fast train while maintaining a safe distance — 20 minutes — between the two trains. It was a difficult task given that the troop train had no speed gauge and no way of knowing exactly how fast, or slow, the 550 was travelling, except when they arrived at the stations the 550 had recently left. In such cases, the troop train would be purposely held back to restore the 20-minute gap.
For wartime security reasons, the movement of troops was kept secret, so while the crew of the troop train knew of the 550 ahead, the crew and passengers of the 550 had no idea there was a train close on their heels.
Half an hour after the 550 pulled out of Petawawa, the faster troop train left Chalk River, 20 kilometres farther north.
A PREMONITION, YOUNG LOVE AND A SURVIVOR
Near the Turcottes in the last car of the 550 sat the O’Briens, Harold and Jean, who were also returning to Ottawa from their family’s Christmas in Petawawa. The youngest of their four children, two-year-old Jackie, was with them, as was Jean’s pregnant sister, Hilda Raby. The other three O’Brien children, Maureen, Sheila and Roy, were staying with their grandparents until New Year’s, when Harold and Jean would return to collect them.
The O’Briens sang Christmas carols, while Maurice Turcotte, a hockey player and fan, may have engaged them in sports talk; Jean and Hilda were sisters of the five hockey-playing Giesebrecht brothers, including Gus, who earlier that year had left the Detroit Red Wings after four seasons to serve in the war overseas.
As the train passed through the Ottawa Valley, it picked up more passengers. At Pembroke, Milton Smith boarded the train and found a seat in the last car, but didn’t stay there long. “I felt some kind of premonition,” he would say later. “I don’t know why, but I felt uneasy and I later got up and walked up to the third coach from the end.”
Meanwhile, as he waited for the train on the Renfrew platform, Mac Crozier noticed the curve of the right-of-way coming into the station and idly wondered what would happen if an arriving train accidentally hit one already in the station. But his thoughts soon returned to Nora Pennett, a young woman he’d met on the train three days earlier.
On Christmas Eve at Toronto’s Union Station, Crozier, who worked for de Havilland aircraft manufacturer at the Downsview airport, noticed a young woman struggling with her parcels as she boarded the train. He had already claimed that last vacant seat, and so he offered to share it with her, and the two struck up a conversation and eventually exchanged their Toronto addresses. As Pennett readied to get off the train at Smiths Falls to board another for Perth, Crozier told her how much he’d enjoyed her company, and said that with her permission, he’d look for her on their return trip on Sunday, to possibly continue where they’d left off. She agreed.
Arnprior’s Doug Snair was a year-and-a-half-old on Dec. 6, 1917, when he survived the Halifax explosion. He was a passenger in a terrible train wreck in Almonte over Christmas 1942.
When the 550 pulled into Renfrew. Crozier boarded the front car, immediately behind the locomotive.
Doug Snair, 26, and his girlfriend, Thyra Shore, also boarded at Renfrew. Entering the third-last coach, they spotted an empty seat near the front, but were told by a woman that it was being held for an expected friend. They looked in each of the last two cars, which were filled to capacity and then some. Returning to the third-last coach, the woman, having by then given up on her friend, relented and offered them the seat. Almost exactly 25 years earlier, on Dec. 6, 1917, when he was just a year old, Snair had survived the Halifax explosion.
Margaret and Eileen Lisinski prior to the December 1942 train wreck in Almonte that crushed both of Margaret’s legs.
Renfrew sisters Margaret and Eileen Lisinski, 20 and 18 respectively, also boarded the train.
The 550 pulled out of Renfrew at 7:17 p.m. The troop train arrived just five minutes later, and was kept at the station until 7:37, to restore the required 20-minute gap. The troop train stopped at the coal chute for more fuel, and at 7:39 p.m. was on its way to Arnprior.
TIME KEEPS ON SLIPPING, SLIPPING, SLIPPING …
It took the local train 29 minutes to get from Renfrew to Arnprior, at which point it was running half an hour late. Fifteen-year-olds Ed Muldoon and his cousin, Eileen McMahon, found a single vacant seat in the second-last car. Eileen sat while Ed stood in the aisle. In the seat across the aisle, he noticed, a woman sat with her bag occupying the otherwise empty seat beside her. Being well-mannered, he said nothing.
The 550 took on more passengers. Had it been able to keep to its schedule, it would have already been in Almonte by then, letting a few passengers off and taking many more on. Instead, at 7:55 p.m., it pulled out of Arnprior.
Seven minutes later, the troop train pulled in. Again it was held up by the station master, restoring the 20-minute block between the trains.
The next station, Pakenham, was unmanned on Sundays and holidays, so there was no one there to warn Howard or Richardson that their train had again gained time on the 550. In fact, there was no reason for the troop train to stop at all in Pakenham.
The 550, meanwhile, stopped again, in Blakeney, a flag stop halfway between Pakenham and Almonte.
How much was the train labouring with its load and the weather and the leak in its boiler? Pulling out of Blakeney, the train was unable to climb the slight incline it faced, and had to back up to a level stretch of track to take a run at it.
The troop train, meanwhile, was getting closer.
THE CURVE BEFORE THE STORM
The 550 arrived at Almonte at 8:32 p.m., 40 minutes late. Due to the length of the train, the two rear cars jutted 50 metres beyond the station limits. In such cases, the crew was expected to place lit fusees at the rear, but on this occasion they didn’t, relying instead on the train’s rear brake lights and a trainman’s red lamp.
Meanwhile, 200 passengers were waiting to board the train. With so few free seats available, the three minutes allotted for boarding stretched to six.
The approach into the Almonte station from Blakeney features a long curve in the tracks that, on this night, was both a blessing and a curse.
As the troop train entered the curve, it shut off its engine power and slowed from approximately 70 km/h to about 40. Fireman Sam Thomson saw that the train order signal above the station was green, indicating that all was clear. Engineer Richardson released the brakes. Mist was rising from the Mississippi River as they crossed over it, while the snow and sleet, as well as steam coming from the rear of the 550, further hampered their vision. Neither saw the local train’s tail lights or the red lamp.
As the troop train came out of the curve, it was approximately 170 metres behind the 550.
The 550 continued boarding passengers. One, Junior Lance Corporal John Dunn, had hoped to board the last car, as that would put him closest to the gate at Union Station when he arrived in Ottawa. His aunt, however, didn’t want to walk all that way in the snow and rain, lest it ruin her new hat. “Can’t we get in up here?” she asked. He looked in the fourth-last car, and then the third last, where he saw a friend of his from Renfrew, seated under the luggage rack of steel pipes and latticework. He returned to the fourth-last, resigned to having to stand for the journey.
Bernie Turcotte, 5, in the Ottawa Civic Hospital following the Almonte train wreck of December 1942. (Photo courtesy of Bernie Turcotte)
In the rear car, five-year-old Bernie Turcotte asked his mother if he could go outside onto the train’s rear platform for a minute, just to look around. Yes, she replied, but be careful. He didn’t stay out there long, though; it was too cold, he told her when he returned. Also, he added, there was a large white light approaching the train from behind.
‘WE THOUGHT IT WAS A BOMB’
Troop train engineer Lorne Richardson was bringing his train out of the curve into Almonte station when he saw the reflection of his own headlight in the glass of the 550’s rear car door, ahead of him.
He applied the emergency brake, but it was too late.
Aboard the 550, conductor M. O’Connell had pulled the signal cord once, announcing that the train was about to pull out of the station.
He didn’t get to pull it a second time.
In the last car, Jean O’Brien heard a noise behind her and turned to investigate. “I saw the huge white headlight of an engine coming through the middle of the coach towards us,” she recounted years later.
“That’s all I remember until I regained consciousness.”
Ann Barski had also been in the last car with her seven-year-old niece. She had seen the troop train’s headlight approach.
“Then suddenly, everything just flew apart and I felt as though I was all in pieces.”
The troop train almost completely obliterated the last two cars of the 550 and splitting and destroying much of the third-last before coming to a halt partway through it.
“We thought it was a bomb,” recalls Ed Muldoon, who was in the second-last car with his cousin, Eileen. “Everything was gone in an instant. We were suddenly buried under debris. We didn’t seem to be hurt.”
Ed Muldoon at the site of the Almonte train wreck of December 1942. He was 15 when he survived the accident. Since then he’s suffered repeated nightmares.
Muldoon recalls passengers screaming as bodies were crushed or thrown into the air, and the confusion he felt at seeing a locomotive directly behind him.
On the front of the troop train, he saw what looked like a bundle of blankets; he would learn later that it was the pregnant Hilda Raby.
Margaret Lisinski was also thrown from the train; her legs were both shattered.
Margaret Lisinski had both her legs crushed in the December 1942 train wreck in Almonte. She’s been in pain for much of the last 75 years.
There were screams, cries for help and calls to loved ones, but at least one witness remembered a strange calm. Gunner William Parsons was on board the troop train. “We knew there had to be many dead and injured in the wreckage,” he said, “but there was no sound. All was silent. Huge snowflakes were falling quietly.
“It is difficult to describe how I felt at that moment,” he added. “I was an innocent 20-year-old, just off the farm. I had never even seen a dead body. It was like being in the midst of a nightmare.”
When rescuers finally reached Muldoon more than four hours after the cash, he spotted Richardson, the troop train’s engineer, still in its locomotive, his head buried in one arm. “I remember wondering, ‘What’s going through your mind?’”
Thirty-three people were killed in the collision — three more would die en route to the hospital and still three more in the coming weeks. Between 150 and 200 were injured, many of them badly.
SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS SPRING INTO ACTION
Soldiers poured out of the troop train to help, while nearby residents opened their doors. (Some, in fact, gave up their doors, to be used as temporary stretchers). Orange crates were broken up to be used as splints, and clothing and curtains torn up for bandages. A bonfire was lit to keep people warm. Almonte’s three doctors were called, and its 20-bed Rosamond Hospital filled. A four-car hospital train was summoned from Ottawa.
Meanwhile, Lance Corporal Dunn returned to what was left of the third-last car, where he found his friend, the one who was under the luggage rack, now lifelessly impaled by it.
Jean O’Brien ignored her broken collarbone and pelvis, and wandered about the wreckage, searching in vain for her husband, her sister and her son, Jackie.
Gunner Parsons was commandeered by a woman to escort her about the scene. She at one point led him into the basement of the town hall, which was serving as a makeshift morgue. “Bodies were being laid out in rows,” he recalled, “twisted, mangled and blackened.”
O’Brien Theatre, across the street from the wreckage, housed many of the sick and displaced passengers. Pte. F.R. Whitta gave up his shirt and tunic to make bandages and tourniquets, then aided doctors in surgery for hours in the falling snow. He and another soldier, Sgt. J.W. Gillespie, were awarded the British Empire Medal for their actions that night, while Lt. Nursing Sister Anne Thorpe received the Royal Red Cross, Second Class.
Muldoon was aboard the hospital train as it filled, and remembers two CPR representatives boarding and insisting that he, and others, sign a form. Fifteen years old and frightened, he and his cousin signed.
Ed Muldoon, who was 15 when he survived the Almonte train wreck of December 1942, holds a railway spike he picked up at the site of the crash. Since the accident he’s suffered repeated nightmares. (Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen)
It was a waiver, exonerating the railway company of liability.
“We weren’t looking for money,” he says. “We were looking for help.”
At 5:30 a.m., the hospital train arrived at Union Station in Ottawa, carrying 84 stretcher cases and 20 walking wounded. Thirty-one ambulances were waiting for the train. From one, a thief had stolen the gas.
The injured were fortunate in one respect: Many of the patients at the Civic Hospital had been sent home for the Christmas holidays, freeing up some 200 beds. Twenty doctors worked night and day in the hospital’s six operating rooms. After examining her legs, Dr. Murray promised Margaret Lisinski that he’d do all he could to save them.
Maurice, Cecile and five-year-old Bernie Turcotte all suffered fractured legs, while the latter also had fractured arms. Given their immobility, it was almost a month before they could even see one another, and six before they could leave the hospital. Cecile, meanwhile, wasn’t told for two days following the accident that her eight-month-old daughter, Denyse, was dead.
‘YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD’
Only a couple of hours after the collision, another train arrived in Almonte to take the uninjured passengers on to their destinations. And although the rear three coaches of the 550 were destroyed and many passengers killed or hurt, there were few casualties beyond those three cars. In the front cars and engine, which were pushed about 50 metres down the track, the sudden jolt spilled luggage while windows shattered and the power went out.
As Mac Crozier travelled back to Toronto, he thought again about Nora Pennett. He should offer her an apology, or an explanation, at least, as to why he didn’t make her train, he thought. She may have seen the papers and been worried for him.
Back in Toronto, he took the streetcar to Yonge and Bloor, transferred to another line, then walked to her apartment and knocked on the door. Her sister, Frances, answered.
“Excuse me,” said Crozier, “would Miss Pennett be in?”
“Yes, she is,” Frances replied, “but just who are you?”
“Mac Crozier.”
“Mac Crozier! You can’t be! My sister says you must be dead. We’ve been looking for your name in the list of people killed in that awful train wreck. You’re supposed to be dead!”
Mac and Nora married in November 1943, and the first of their five children, Gail, was born the following September. When the war ended, de Havilland let Crozier go, and he and Nora moved to Renfrew, where he worked for the post office.
Doug Snair, who had survived the Halifax explosion 25 years earlier, and his girlfriend, Thyra Shore, walked away from the crash unscathed except for the broken crystal of his watch. The four people who had been sitting across the aisle from them in the third-last coach were killed. Snair and Shore were eventually married.
A week after the accident, incidentally, the pair went back to Renfrew to celebrate the New Year. Returning to Ottawa on the same Sunday Evening Special, their train was held up at Stittsville by a heavy snowstorm, and they and the other passengers were obliged to spend the night in the train.
Th Ottawa Journal’s front page on the day following the Almonte train wreck of 1942.
A coroner’s inquest into the accident opened at Almonte’s town hall on Jan. 7, 1943, just 11 days after the accident. Two days earlier, on Jan. 5, troop train conductor John Howard’s son, Delmar, arriving in Smiths Falls from Detroit to visit with his parents, reported his father missing.
At 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 6, Howard’s body was found in the Rideau River, just below the rapids beneath Smiths Falls’ Perrin Plow Bridge. Prior to taking his life, Howard left a note that read, in part, “I am sorry I have to do this, but I don’t want to go to jail. I was not responsible for that accident. I hope you will forgive me for doing this, but I can’t help it.
The Ottawa Journal’s front-page headline announces troop train conductor John Howard’s death in January 1943, days after the Almonte train wreck.
“God is my judge,” he added. “I made no mistakes and I broke no rules. But I can’t stand it if they accuse me of causing 36 deaths.”
The inquiry laid the blame on CPR, but not on the individual trainmen, noting that they were given confusing orders: to keep up a good speed while staying a safe distance from the local train.
A later investigation, conducted by the Board of Transport Commissioners for Canada, reached a different conclusion, however, citing failures by the crews of both trains.
Maurice Turcotte sued the CPR, eventually claiming a settlement that, according to son Bernie, was in excess of $40,000 (almost $600,000 today), including $4,000 for Bernie’s university education, but no compensation at all for Denyse’s death. Denyse was buried at Notre Dame Cemetery. Owing to their injuries, Bernie and his parents were unable to attend her funeral.
Maurice stayed on with Bell, but moved to, as Bernie put it, “the other side of the tracks,” from sharing a triplex on Cambridge Avenue North to owning their own house in the Glebe.
“The real lesson,” says Bernie of the Almonte townspeople’s and soldiers’ response to the crash, “was that people can really be damn decent when they have to.”
Jean O’Brien, whose family had sat near the Turcottes in the last car of the 550, remained in the hospital for three months. Her husband, Harold, and son Jackie were both killed. Jean’s pregnant sister, Hilda, spent a year in hospital after shattering her wrists, hips and legs and suffering facial lacerations. She would eventually walk again, with the aid of a brace. Her baby was stillborn at the Civic.
Ed Muldoon, the 15-year-old who was among those to sign the waiver, suffered only superficial physical injuries in the accident, but even 75 years later the Kanata resident experiences nightmares at least once a week.
“I can see everything,” he says. “I can hear all the sounds, the tearing and breaking, the screams of people crying. There was a baby thrown out of the train and under a bush by the tracks, but it was alive. I can hear it, too.”
Until recently, he would return to the scene of the accident once or twice every summer, just to stand alone for 10 or 15 minutes where the tracks were, or sometimes walk the long curve. “I don’t know why I did it,” he says. “Therapy maybe.”
Dr. Murray was able to save Margaret Lisinski’s legs, but not all of her spirit. Now 95, she has spent most of her life in physical and emotional pain — the former, she notes, whenever it rains or the weather turns, and the latter just about any other time. After the accident, Christmas became a less-than-joyous reminder of the scars that cover her legs. She used to say that all she wanted for Christmas were two new legs. Additionally, she never married: “What man,” she asks, “would want to marry a woman with broken legs?”
These days she lives in a retirement residence in Ottawa’s west end. On the walls above her bed are a wooden crucifix draped with strings of rosary beads — her faith has helped her reconcile her experience — and a framed picture of skaters on the Rideau Canal. Before Dec. 27, 1942, she says, she was an avid skater. Since then, she’s been unable to.
“All I’ve ever wanted is to forget the accident,” she says. But it keeps raining.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
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The Turcottes found four seats together in the last coach of the Sunday Evening Special, the train they were taking home to Ottawa from their Christmas celebrations in Petawawa.
Maurice Turcotte, his wife Cecile and their two children, five-year-old Bernie and eight-month-old Denyse, had spent the holidays with Maurice’s mother, Clara, who had never before seen her grandchildren in person.
It was Dec. 27, 1942, and the following morning, a Monday, Maurice was expected back at work, installing telephones for Bell.
Bernie Turcotte was five years old when he survived the Almonte train wreck of December 1942. His 8-month-old sister, Denyse, was killed in the accident.
Over the next few hours, as it stopped in such communities as Renfrew, Arnprior, Pakenham and Almonte, the 10 wooden passenger cars of Canadian Pacific Railway train No. 550 filled to overflowing with passengers, most returning home to Ottawa from their holidays in the Valley.
Despite the cramped quarters, the mood was festive.
The train left Petawawa on time, at 5:35 p.m. Outside, a mixture of rain, sleet and snow fell, making progress difficult for the engine, a 34-year-old locomotive known, somewhat less than affectionately, as the “cantankerous old hog.”
Denyse Turcotte, shown here four months before the Almonte train wreck, was eight months old when the accident claimed her life. (Photo courtesy of Bernie Turcotte)
It normally hauled five cars or fewer but, with the added demands of the Christmas season, was being pressed into far more taxing service. A leak in the boiler made it increasingly difficult to maintain pressure, which, coupled with the icy tracks and heavy load, conspired to keep the train slow and late.
Normally, this would have been a bearable inconvenience for the train’s passengers and crew. On this night, however, it proved disastrous, as a faster, larger locomotive bore down on it from behind.
THE TROOP TRAIN
Passenger Extra 2802 East was carrying soldiers and other military personnel from Red Deer, Alta., to Halifax, where they would deploy overseas to Europe’s theatre of war. Hurtling through the night, its engine, caboose and 13 metal coaches weighed more than 1,000 tons.
After 32 years working on freight trains, Smiths Falls native Lorne Richardson was making his inaugural run as engineer of a passenger train. Sixty-four-year-old conductor John Howard, meanwhile, also a Smiths Falls resident, had been a CPR conductor since 1911, five years after he joined the company as a porter. He had another year to go before retirement.
Richardson, Howard and the rest of the crew of 2802 knew the 550 was ahead of them. They’d been given orders to keep a fast train while maintaining a safe distance — 20 minutes — between the two trains. It was a difficult task given that the troop train had no speed gauge and no way of knowing exactly how fast, or slow, the 550 was travelling, except when they arrived at the stations the 550 had recently left. In such cases, the troop train would be purposely held back to restore the 20-minute gap.
For wartime security reasons, the movement of troops was kept secret, so while the crew of the troop train knew of the 550 ahead, the crew and passengers of the 550 had no idea there was a train close on their heels.
Half an hour after the 550 pulled out of Petawawa, the faster troop train left Chalk River, 20 kilometres farther north.
A PREMONITION, YOUNG LOVE AND A SURVIVOR
Near the Turcottes in the last car of the 550 sat the O’Briens, Harold and Jean, who were also returning to Ottawa from their family’s Christmas in Petawawa. The youngest of their four children, two-year-old Jackie, was with them, as was Jean’s pregnant sister, Hilda Raby. The other three O’Brien children, Maureen, Sheila and Roy, were staying with their grandparents until New Year’s, when Harold and Jean would return to collect them.
The O’Briens sang Christmas carols, while Maurice Turcotte, a hockey player and fan, may have engaged them in sports talk; Jean and Hilda were sisters of the five hockey-playing Giesebrecht brothers, including Gus, who earlier that year had left the Detroit Red Wings after four seasons to serve in the war overseas.
As the train passed through the Ottawa Valley, it picked up more passengers. At Pembroke, Milton Smith boarded the train and found a seat in the last car, but didn’t stay there long. “I felt some kind of premonition,” he would say later. “I don’t know why, but I felt uneasy and I later got up and walked up to the third coach from the end.”
Meanwhile, as he waited for the train on the Renfrew platform, Mac Crozier noticed the curve of the right-of-way coming into the station and idly wondered what would happen if an arriving train accidentally hit one already in the station. But his thoughts soon returned to Nora Pennett, a young woman he’d met on the train three days earlier.
On Christmas Eve at Toronto’s Union Station, Crozier, who worked for de Havilland aircraft manufacturer at the Downsview airport, noticed a young woman struggling with her parcels as she boarded the train. He had already claimed that last vacant seat, and so he offered to share it with her, and the two struck up a conversation and eventually exchanged their Toronto addresses. As Pennett readied to get off the train at Smiths Falls to board another for Perth, Crozier told her how much he’d enjoyed her company, and said that with her permission, he’d look for her on their return trip on Sunday, to possibly continue where they’d left off. She agreed.
Arnprior’s Doug Snair was a year-and-a-half-old on Dec. 6, 1917, when he survived the Halifax explosion. He was a passenger in a terrible train wreck in Almonte over Christmas 1942.
When the 550 pulled into Renfrew. Crozier boarded the front car, immediately behind the locomotive.
Doug Snair, 26, and his girlfriend, Thyra Shore, also boarded at Renfrew. Entering the third-last coach, they spotted an empty seat near the front, but were told by a woman that it was being held for an expected friend. They looked in each of the last two cars, which were filled to capacity and then some. Returning to the third-last coach, the woman, having by then given up on her friend, relented and offered them the seat. Almost exactly 25 years earlier, on Dec. 6, 1917, when he was just a year old, Snair had survived the Halifax explosion.
Margaret and Eileen Lisinski prior to the December 1942 train wreck in Almonte that crushed both of Margaret’s legs.
Renfrew sisters Margaret and Eileen Lisinski, 20 and 18 respectively, also boarded the train.
The 550 pulled out of Renfrew at 7:17 p.m. The troop train arrived just five minutes later, and was kept at the station until 7:37, to restore the required 20-minute gap. The troop train stopped at the coal chute for more fuel, and at 7:39 p.m. was on its way to Arnprior.
TIME KEEPS ON SLIPPING, SLIPPING, SLIPPING …
It took the local train 29 minutes to get from Renfrew to Arnprior, at which point it was running half an hour late. Fifteen-year-olds Ed Muldoon and his cousin, Eileen McMahon, found a single vacant seat in the second-last car. Eileen sat while Ed stood in the aisle. In the seat across the aisle, he noticed, a woman sat with her bag occupying the otherwise empty seat beside her. Being well-mannered, he said nothing.
The 550 took on more passengers. Had it been able to keep to its schedule, it would have already been in Almonte by then, letting a few passengers off and taking many more on. Instead, at 7:55 p.m., it pulled out of Arnprior.
Seven minutes later, the troop train pulled in. Again it was held up by the station master, restoring the 20-minute block between the trains.
The next station, Pakenham, was unmanned on Sundays and holidays, so there was no one there to warn Howard or Richardson that their train had again gained time on the 550. In fact, there was no reason for the troop train to stop at all in Pakenham.
The 550, meanwhile, stopped again, in Blakeney, a flag stop halfway between Pakenham and Almonte.
How much was the train labouring with its load and the weather and the leak in its boiler? Pulling out of Blakeney, the train was unable to climb the slight incline it faced, and had to back up to a level stretch of track to take a run at it.
The troop train, meanwhile, was getting closer.
THE CURVE BEFORE THE STORM
The 550 arrived at Almonte at 8:32 p.m., 40 minutes late. Due to the length of the train, the two rear cars jutted 50 metres beyond the station limits. In such cases, the crew was expected to place lit fusees at the rear, but on this occasion they didn’t, relying instead on the train’s rear brake lights and a trainman’s red lamp.
Meanwhile, 200 passengers were waiting to board the train. With so few free seats available, the three minutes allotted for boarding stretched to six.
The approach into the Almonte station from Blakeney features a long curve in the tracks that, on this night, was both a blessing and a curse.
As the troop train entered the curve, it shut off its engine power and slowed from approximately 70 km/h to about 40. Fireman Sam Thomson saw that the train order signal above the station was green, indicating that all was clear. Engineer Richardson released the brakes. Mist was rising from the Mississippi River as they crossed over it, while the snow and sleet, as well as steam coming from the rear of the 550, further hampered their vision. Neither saw the local train’s tail lights or the red lamp.
As the troop train came out of the curve, it was approximately 170 metres behind the 550.
The 550 continued boarding passengers. One, Junior Lance Corporal John Dunn, had hoped to board the last car, as that would put him closest to the gate at Union Station when he arrived in Ottawa. His aunt, however, didn’t want to walk all that way in the snow and rain, lest it ruin her new hat. “Can’t we get in up here?” she asked. He looked in the fourth-last car, and then the third last, where he saw a friend of his from Renfrew, seated under the luggage rack of steel pipes and latticework. He returned to the fourth-last, resigned to having to stand for the journey.
Bernie Turcotte, 5, in the Ottawa Civic Hospital following the Almonte train wreck of December 1942. (Photo courtesy of Bernie Turcotte)
In the rear car, five-year-old Bernie Turcotte asked his mother if he could go outside onto the train’s rear platform for a minute, just to look around. Yes, she replied, but be careful. He didn’t stay out there long, though; it was too cold, he told her when he returned. Also, he added, there was a large white light approaching the train from behind.
‘WE THOUGHT IT WAS A BOMB’
Troop train engineer Lorne Richardson was bringing his train out of the curve into Almonte station when he saw the reflection of his own headlight in the glass of the 550’s rear car door, ahead of him.
He applied the emergency brake, but it was too late.
Aboard the 550, conductor M. O’Connell had pulled the signal cord once, announcing that the train was about to pull out of the station.
He didn’t get to pull it a second time.
In the last car, Jean O’Brien heard a noise behind her and turned to investigate. “I saw the huge white headlight of an engine coming through the middle of the coach towards us,” she recounted years later.
“That’s all I remember until I regained consciousness.”
Ann Barski had also been in the last car with her seven-year-old niece. She had seen the troop train’s headlight approach.
“Then suddenly, everything just flew apart and I felt as though I was all in pieces.”
The troop train almost completely obliterated the last two cars of the 550 and splitting and destroying much of the third-last before coming to a halt partway through it.
“We thought it was a bomb,” recalls Ed Muldoon, who was in the second-last car with his cousin, Eileen. “Everything was gone in an instant. We were suddenly buried under debris. We didn’t seem to be hurt.”
Ed Muldoon at the site of the Almonte train wreck of December 1942. He was 15 when he survived the accident. Since then he’s suffered repeated nightmares.
Muldoon recalls passengers screaming as bodies were crushed or thrown into the air, and the confusion he felt at seeing a locomotive directly behind him.
On the front of the troop train, he saw what looked like a bundle of blankets; he would learn later that it was the pregnant Hilda Raby.
Margaret Lisinski was also thrown from the train; her legs were both shattered.
Margaret Lisinski had both her legs crushed in the December 1942 train wreck in Almonte. She’s been in pain for much of the last 75 years.
There were screams, cries for help and calls to loved ones, but at least one witness remembered a strange calm. Gunner William Parsons was on board the troop train. “We knew there had to be many dead and injured in the wreckage,” he said, “but there was no sound. All was silent. Huge snowflakes were falling quietly.
“It is difficult to describe how I felt at that moment,” he added. “I was an innocent 20-year-old, just off the farm. I had never even seen a dead body. It was like being in the midst of a nightmare.”
When rescuers finally reached Muldoon more than four hours after the cash, he spotted Richardson, the troop train’s engineer, still in its locomotive, his head buried in one arm. “I remember wondering, ‘What’s going through your mind?’”
Thirty-three people were killed in the collision — three more would die en route to the hospital and still three more in the coming weeks. Between 150 and 200 were injured, many of them badly.
SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS SPRING INTO ACTION
Soldiers poured out of the troop train to help, while nearby residents opened their doors. (Some, in fact, gave up their doors, to be used as temporary stretchers). Orange crates were broken up to be used as splints, and clothing and curtains torn up for bandages. A bonfire was lit to keep people warm. Almonte’s three doctors were called, and its 20-bed Rosamond Hospital filled. A four-car hospital train was summoned from Ottawa.
Meanwhile, Lance Corporal Dunn returned to what was left of the third-last car, where he found his friend, the one who was under the luggage rack, now lifelessly impaled by it.
Jean O’Brien ignored her broken collarbone and pelvis, and wandered about the wreckage, searching in vain for her husband, her sister and her son, Jackie.
Gunner Parsons was commandeered by a woman to escort her about the scene. She at one point led him into the basement of the town hall, which was serving as a makeshift morgue. “Bodies were being laid out in rows,” he recalled, “twisted, mangled and blackened.”
O’Brien Theatre, across the street from the wreckage, housed many of the sick and displaced passengers. Pte. F.R. Whitta gave up his shirt and tunic to make bandages and tourniquets, then aided doctors in surgery for hours in the falling snow. He and another soldier, Sgt. J.W. Gillespie, were awarded the British Empire Medal for their actions that night, while Lt. Nursing Sister Anne Thorpe received the Royal Red Cross, Second Class.
Muldoon was aboard the hospital train as it filled, and remembers two CPR representatives boarding and insisting that he, and others, sign a form. Fifteen years old and frightened, he and his cousin signed.
Ed Muldoon, who was 15 when he survived the Almonte train wreck of December 1942, holds a railway spike he picked up at the site of the crash. Since the accident he’s suffered repeated nightmares. (Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen)
It was a waiver, exonerating the railway company of liability.
“We weren’t looking for money,” he says. “We were looking for help.”
At 5:30 a.m., the hospital train arrived at Union Station in Ottawa, carrying 84 stretcher cases and 20 walking wounded. Thirty-one ambulances were waiting for the train. From one, a thief had stolen the gas.
The injured were fortunate in one respect: Many of the patients at the Civic Hospital had been sent home for the Christmas holidays, freeing up some 200 beds. Twenty doctors worked night and day in the hospital’s six operating rooms. After examining her legs, Dr. Murray promised Margaret Lisinski that he’d do all he could to save them.
Maurice, Cecile and five-year-old Bernie Turcotte all suffered fractured legs, while the latter also had fractured arms. Given their immobility, it was almost a month before they could even see one another, and six before they could leave the hospital. Cecile, meanwhile, wasn’t told for two days following the accident that her eight-month-old daughter, Denyse, was dead.
‘YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD’
Only a couple of hours after the collision, another train arrived in Almonte to take the uninjured passengers on to their destinations. And although the rear three coaches of the 550 were destroyed and many passengers killed or hurt, there were few casualties beyond those three cars. In the front cars and engine, which were pushed about 50 metres down the track, the sudden jolt spilled luggage while windows shattered and the power went out.
As Mac Crozier travelled back to Toronto, he thought again about Nora Pennett. He should offer her an apology, or an explanation, at least, as to why he didn’t make her train, he thought. She may have seen the papers and been worried for him.
Back in Toronto, he took the streetcar to Yonge and Bloor, transferred to another line, then walked to her apartment and knocked on the door. Her sister, Frances, answered.
“Excuse me,” said Crozier, “would Miss Pennett be in?”
“Yes, she is,” Frances replied, “but just who are you?”
“Mac Crozier.”
“Mac Crozier! You can’t be! My sister says you must be dead. We’ve been looking for your name in the list of people killed in that awful train wreck. You’re supposed to be dead!”
Mac and Nora married in November 1943, and the first of their five children, Gail, was born the following September. When the war ended, de Havilland let Crozier go, and he and Nora moved to Renfrew, where he worked for the post office.
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Doug Snair, who had survived the Halifax explosion 25 years earlier, and his girlfriend, Thyra Shore, walked away from the crash unscathed except for the broken crystal of his watch. The four people who had been sitting across the aisle from them in the third-last coach were killed. Snair and Shore were eventually married.
A week after the accident, incidentally, the pair went back to Renfrew to celebrate the New Year. Returning to Ottawa on the same Sunday Evening Special, their train was held up at Stittsville by a heavy snowstorm, and they and the other passengers were obliged to spend the night in the train.
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Th Ottawa Journal’s front page on the day following the Almonte train wreck of 1942.
A coroner’s inquest into the accident opened at Almonte’s town hall on Jan. 7, 1943, just 11 days after the accident. Two days earlier, on Jan. 5, troop train conductor John Howard’s son, Delmar, arriving in Smiths Falls from Detroit to visit with his parents, reported his father missing.
At 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 6, Howard’s body was found in the Rideau River, just below the rapids beneath Smiths Falls’ Perrin Plow Bridge. Prior to taking his life, Howard left a note that read, in part, “I am sorry I have to do this, but I don’t want to go to jail. I was not responsible for that accident. I hope you will forgive me for doing this, but I can’t help it.
The Ottawa Journal’s front-page headline announces troop train conductor John Howard’s death in January 1943, days after the Almonte train wreck.
“God is my judge,” he added. “I made no mistakes and I broke no rules. But I can’t stand it if they accuse me of causing 36 deaths.”
The inquiry laid the blame on CPR, but not on the individual trainmen, noting that they were given confusing orders: to keep up a good speed while staying a safe distance from the local train.
A later investigation, conducted by the Board of Transport Commissioners for Canada, reached a different conclusion, however, citing failures by the crews of both trains.
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Maurice Turcotte sued the CPR, eventually claiming a settlement that, according to son Bernie, was in excess of $40,000 (almost $600,000 today), including $4,000 for Bernie’s university education, but no compensation at all for Denyse’s death. Denyse was buried at Notre Dame Cemetery. Owing to their injuries, Bernie and his parents were unable to attend her funeral.
Maurice stayed on with Bell, but moved to, as Bernie put it, “the other side of the tracks,” from sharing a triplex on Cambridge Avenue North to owning their own house in the Glebe.
“The real lesson,” says Bernie of the Almonte townspeople’s and soldiers’ response to the crash, “was that people can really be damn decent when they have to.”
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Jean O’Brien, whose family had sat near the Turcottes in the last car of the 550, remained in the hospital for three months. Her husband, Harold, and son Jackie were both killed. Jean’s pregnant sister, Hilda, spent a year in hospital after shattering her wrists, hips and legs and suffering facial lacerations. She would eventually walk again, with the aid of a brace. Her baby was stillborn at the Civic.
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Ed Muldoon, the 15-year-old who was among those to sign the waiver, suffered only superficial physical injuries in the accident, but even 75 years later the Kanata resident experiences nightmares at least once a week.
“I can see everything,” he says. “I can hear all the sounds, the tearing and breaking, the screams of people crying. There was a baby thrown out of the train and under a bush by the tracks, but it was alive. I can hear it, too.”
Until recently, he would return to the scene of the accident once or twice every summer, just to stand alone for 10 or 15 minutes where the tracks were, or sometimes walk the long curve. “I don’t know why I did it,” he says. “Therapy maybe.”
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Dr. Murray was able to save Margaret Lisinski’s legs, but not all of her spirit. Now 95, she has spent most of her life in physical and emotional pain — the former, she notes, whenever it rains or the weather turns, and the latter just about any other time. After the accident, Christmas became a less-than-joyous reminder of the scars that cover her legs. She used to say that all she wanted for Christmas were two new legs. Additionally, she never married: “What man,” she asks, “would want to marry a woman with broken legs?”
These days she lives in a retirement residence in Ottawa’s west end. On the walls above her bed are a wooden crucifix draped with strings of rosary beads — her faith has helped her reconcile her experience — and a framed picture of skaters on the Rideau Canal. Before Dec. 27, 1942, she says, she was an avid skater. Since then, she’s been unable to.
“All I’ve ever wanted is to forget the accident,” she says. But it keeps raining.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
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