History of the Johnstown Flood: Including all the Fearful Record; the Breaking of the South Fork Dam; the Sweeping Out of the Conemaugh Valley; the Over-Throw of Johnstown; the Massing of the Wreck at the Railroad Bridge; Escapes, Rescues, Searches for Survivors and the Dead; Relief Organizations, Stupendous Charities, etc., etc., With Full Accounts also of the Destruction on the Susquehanna and Juniata Rivers, and the Bald Eagle Creek.Johnson, Willis Fletcher
History
History of the Johnstown Flood: Including all the Fearful Record; the Breaking of the South Fork Dam; the Sweeping Out of the Conemaugh Valley; the Over-Throw of Johnstown; the Massing of the Wreck at the Railroad Bridge; Escapes, Rescues, Searches for Survivors and the Dead; Relief Organizations, Stupendous Charities, etc., etc., With Full Accounts also of the Destruction on the Susquehanna and Juniata Rivers, and the Bald Eagle Creek.
The wonders of this playground, where a giant force played with masses
of iron, weighing scores of tons each, as a child might play with
pebbles, begins with a bridge, or a piece of a bridge, about thirty feet
long, that stands high and dry upon two ordinary stone abutments at
Woodvale. The part of the bridge that remains spanned the Pennsylvania
tracks. The tracks are gone, the bridge is gone on either side, the
river is gone to a new channel, the very earth for a hundred yards
around has been scraped off and swept away, but this little span remains
perched up there, twenty feet above everything, in the midst of a desert
of ruins--the only piece of a bridge that is standing from the railroad
bridge to South Forks. It is a light iron structure, and the abutments
are not unusually heavy. That it should be kept there, when everything
else was twisted and torn to pieces, is one other queer freak of this
flood. Near by are the wrecks of two freight trains that were standing
side by side when the flood caught them. The lower ends of both trains
are torn to pieces, the cars tossed around in every direction, and many
of them carried away. The whole of the train on the track nearest the
river was smashed into kindling wood. Its locomotive is gone entirely,
perhaps because this other train acted as a sort of buffer for the
second one. The latter has twenty-five or thirty cars that are
uninjured, apparently. They could move off as soon as that wonderful
engine, No. 1309, that stands with steam up at their head, gets ready
to pull out. A second look, however, shows that the track is in many
places literally washed from beneath the cars. Some of the trucks also
are turned half way around and standing with wheels running across the
track. But the force that did this left the light wood box cars
themselves unharmed. They were loaded with dressed beef and provisions.
They have been emptied to supply the hungry in Johnstown.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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