M
50 CLASSIC TRAINS FALL 2019ore than 50 years ago I came to possess 16 peculiar railroad photos.
They depicted an unidentified Erie Railroad passenger train derailed at
an unknown location on an unknown date. One image showed an
Army tank shorn of its turret. In the intervening five decades I would
manage to assemble the story of the event depicted in the photos.
The images were a gift of Ethel Huggins, a clerk at the Erie’s Kent, Ohio,
yard who would be married to two Erie men in her lifetime. Her second hus-
band, passenger conductor Pete Gleespen, died in the early 1960s, about when
I came to know Ethel.
As she was cleaning out some of Pete’s work-related items, Ethel set aside a
number of things she thought this kid who loved trains would like. Among the
items were his conductor hat and uniform buttons, which I still have and cher-
ish. There also was an envelope containing the 16 black-and-white photos, but
no information about the incident. I put the images in my box of train pic-
tures, and after a while they were forgotten.
After graduating from high school, I hired out as a relief clerk at successor
Erie Lackawanna’s McCoy Street Yard in Akron. Remembering the photos, I
asked the train crews and other clerks if they knew anything about what hap-
pened. A few remembered the accident but were unable to provide details.
In the mid-1970s I rediscovered the box with the photos. This was just be-
fore EL was absorbed into Conrail, so I wrote a letter to the company’s general
offices in Cleveland, but did not expect, nor receive, a reply. However, with
some basic detective work, I was able to glean some clues from the photos.
As Pete worked on the Kent Division, I assumed the derailment occurred
somewhere along its length. By studying the photos, I knew the wreck took
place where there were four main tracks adjacent to each other. The Kent Divi-
sion’s only such segment of track was from JO Tower in Akron to Barberton, 7
miles west. This arrangement included the Erie’s double-track main line and a
parallel joint Baltimore & Ohio-Pennsylvania Railroad main line to the south.
Furthermore, what appeared to be a canal ran south of the tracks.
One photo showed a steam locomotive near the rear of the work train. The
Kent Division was dieselized, by my estimate, around 1953. Also, the treesBY DAN OLAH • Photos from the author’s collection
A mystery derailment on the Erie
Railroad, conveyed to the author in 16
black-and-white prints, involved an
Army tank shorn of its turret.The Kent Division employee timetable
No. 44, issued on the day before the in-
cident, includes multiple pages of spe-
cial instructions — but not one mention
of what to do when encountering an
Army tank on the right of way.