On the morning of August 12, 1853, a passenger train carrying hundreds of holidaymakers was making its way from Massachusetts towards the beaches of Rhode Island. The journey was supposed to be a pleasant excursion, but somewhere along the Providence and Worcester Railroad, a seemingly insignificant delay would turn the outing into a catastrophe. In the space of a few moments, two passenger trains collided head-on, crushing wooden carriages, mangling locomotives and killing fourteen people.
The accident, which came to be known as the Valley Falls train collision, exposed the shortcomings of the railway industry's safety practices, eventually leading to the establishment of a reliable system of timekeeping for the nation's railways.
A daguerreotype photograph of the collision taken shortly after it occurred.
Before the introduction of standard time, towns and cities in the United States maintained their own local times. These were generally determined by the sun, with noon occurring when the sun reached its highest point in the sky. Since the sun's position varied geographically, the clocks of neighbouring towns could differ by several minutes.
This was not particularly troublesome when people travelled by horse-drawn carriage. Trains, however, travelled at speeds that made even a small discrepancy in time potentially disastrous. A train that was a few minutes late could find itself occupying a stretch of track that another train was scheduled to use.
Railway companies attempted to solve the problem through timetables. Conductors were responsible for keeping their trains on schedule, while engineers and other railway employees relied on watches to determine when trains should depart, arrive or pass one another. On single-track lines, where trains travelling in opposite directions had to share the same rails, the system was particularly vulnerable.
The Providence and Worcester Railroad was one such railway. A section of its main line between Valley Falls and Pawtucket consisted of a single track. Trains travelling in opposite directions were expected to meet at designated points, where one would wait for the other to pass.
On the morning of August 12, 1853, a special excursion train departed from Uxbridge, Massachusetts, at approximately 6:30 a.m. travelling south along the Providence and Worcester Railroad. It consisted of several passenger carriages carrying around 475 holidaymakers. Meanwhile, a regularly scheduled passenger train was travelling north from Providence towards Worcester.
According to the railway timetable, the northbound train had stopped at the designated point at Pawtucket for five minutes plus an additional minute, to allow for the southbound excursion to clear the tracks. After waiting for a total of six minutes, the northbound train proceeded onto the single track section at a slow speed.
However, the southbound excursion train was running late and to make up for the lost time it was rushing forward on the same stretch of railway. At approximately eight o'clock in the morning, just after rounding a curve, the northbound train was struck by the excursion, which was travelling at an estimated 40 miles per hour. The locomotives were crushed together, and the wooden passenger carriages were reduced to splintered wreckage. The force of the collision caused some carriages to telescope into one another, trapping passengers beneath twisted timber and iron. Fourteen people were killed, while at least seventeen suffered serious injuries. Numerous other passengers sustained less severe wounds.
At the coroner's inquest held in the wake of the disaster, the conductor of the southbound excursion train, Frederick W. Putnam, was held largely responsible for the collision. He had allowed his train to proceed despite its being behind schedule, leaving insufficient time for it to clear the single-track section before the northbound train was due. It was also found his watch was two minutes behind the actual time, even though Putnam had set it according to the company's established time in Providence the previous night. It was also argued that Putnam was “culpable carelessness, inexperience, and want of judgement” and ever since he had assumed responsibility of the southbound train, it had often run behind schedule. The railway company was blamed or placing an inexperienced conductor in charge of a large excursion train and failing to take action for the regularly running behind schedule. Management was also blamed for failing to provide conductors with reliable watches.
The conductor of the northbound train was blamed as well. The train’s crew did not start the train at the designated time, instead taking an additional minute to begin moving. Had the train departed a minute earlier, it would have been past the curve north of Boston Switch and would have been visible from Valley Falls station. With visual cues, both trains could have been stopped on time, making it likely the collision could have been averted.
Finally, the practice of controlling trains solely by timetable, and that trains were scheduled so closely together, was found to be fundamentally unsafe. There was no comprehensive signalling system between stations. Instead, conductors were expected to follow timetables, consult their watches and exercise sound judgement.
The Valley Falls collision forced the Providence and Worcester Railroad to reconsider its operating practices. One of the most important responses was the decision to install double tracks along its main line. With separate tracks for trains travelling in opposite directions, the danger of head-on collisions could be eliminated.
The accident also reinforced the need for better railway coordination. Timetables and personal watches were proving inadequate and a more dependable system of timekeeping and train control was becoming essential. The collision is frequently associated with the development of standard railway time in the United States. It took a few decades for the system to roll out. The American railway time system was formally adopted in 1883, thirty years after the Valley Falls disaster.
The Valley Falls collision also became the first railway accident to be photographed. Shortly after the accident, a photographer named L. Wright of Pawtucket arrived at the scene and captured the wreckage using a daguerreotype. The photograph showed the mangled locomotives and the remains of the passenger carriages, with a crowd of people gathered around the wreck. The image is now regarded as one of the earliest photographic records of a railway accident, and it is widely described as the first train wreck ever photographed.
The daguerreotype was subsequently used as the basis for a wood engraving published in the New York Illustrated News on August 27, 1853. The illustration allowed readers who lived far away from Rhode Island to see the destruction for themselves.
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