Page:Vincent F. Seyfried - The Long Island Rail Road A Comprehensive History - Vol. 2 (1963).pdf/91

 Operations on the Flushing and North Side was killed. The front part of the smoking car was badly crushed and broken, and the forward truck fell into the water, yet no one within suffered anything more than scratches and bruises. Within minutes the news reached Flushing and College Point. An engine was dispatched from College Point and took the passengers in the two undamaged coaches to Bridge Street depot, and from there carriages were hired to deliver the passengers individually to their homes. Wrecking crews worked all that night to lift the smoking car and repair the track, but in vain. The morning light revealed that the draw had been knocked seven feet off center, the castings of the swing so badly broken as to need replacement, and the main center bearing three inches out of line. The locomotive was altogether out of sight and the tender half buried. Not till six days later, on the nineteenth of December, could trains again move over the patched drawbridge.

The inquiry produced some interesting details. The bridge was in charge of a tender named McKenna who had been on the job twelve years and whose character up to now had been unassailable. For some reason he had gone drinking that afternoon, off and on, and admitted that by 6 P.M. he no longer had full control of his faculties. McKenna had opened the draw just before 6 P.M. to let a sloop pass; it had taken ten minutes to get the boat through, and twenty minutes later the fatal train approached. The rules called for placing red flags by day and red lamps by night on the track whenever the draw was to be opened. This McKenna didn't bother to do, thinking that he could close the draw before the Hunter's Point train arrived. If the track on the draw was clear, the rules called for a green flag or green lamp signifying caution, and a green and white signal for all-clear. McKenna obviously set no signal at all and forgot to close the draw. On the fourteenth McKenna was arrested but eventually freed with only the loss of his job as a penalty. The Coast Wrecking Co. under Capt. I. J. Merritt, founder of the present big Merritt-Chapman firm, and at that time an alderman in Whitestone, undertook to lift the engine which was not fished out until March 18, 1871,and not restored to service until July 4.

The ferry facilities of the Flushing & North Side R.R. were shared with the Long Island R.R. Both roads terminated at the