Newark evening star and Newark advertiser. [volume] (Newark, N.J.) 1909-1916, 1911-01-09
ENGINEER ROASTED
To DEATH BENEATH
DEBRIS Of WRECK
Locomotive Plunges Over 20
foot Embankment at
Harrison.
MISPLACED SWITCHES ARE
BLAMED FOR CATASTROPHE
For Three Hours Man Endures
Agony Pinned Beneath
Cab.
FOR more than three hours this morn

For more than three hours this morn
ing Engineer George W. Reid, alive.
lay pinned beneath the Lackawanna
locomotive, with which he had plunged
twenty feet from the elevated tracks
into the street at Harrison.
More than an hour of that time he
was conscious and looked up from his
fiery prison to hear helpless doctors
pleading hysterically with the crowd
of powerless spectators to lift the en-
gina off his crushed body. When a
wrecking crew finally did arrive from
Hoboken the man was dead. At 10
O'Clock this morning the wrecked en-
gine still lay in the street.
Somebody at the switches blundered.
it is said, or the fatal crash would not
have occurred.
Reid, who lived at 2O7 Ninth street,
Jersey City, had been ordered to take
a freight train of two beef-f1lled cars
from Harrison to South Orange.
Going Thirty Miles an Hour.
With John Gorsky of 16s Third street,
South Orange, as his fireman, he pulled
out OF the Harrison station at 2:10 a.
M, got the clear way" signal half
mile beyond and speeded his short train
up to thirty miles an hour as he came
to the switches on the high-raised rail-
road structure towering thirty feet
over Fifth street.
The track his train should have run
on was the west passenger. But the
track the switch sent him off on was a
blind track that ends in a bumper just
above the street.
Gorsky saw the danger first and
yelled. At the same moment Reid
turned off the steam and clamped down
every brake, but there was not time to
stop Gorsky tried to jump but was
not quick enough. At the Same mo-
ment the engine hit the bumper at
twenty miles an hour. riocheted from
that impact to the side of the tracks
and fell on its head into the street be-
low. There 1t plunged for a moment
drunkenly among the cobblestones,
nloushing through them and wrecking
itself. then tottered over on its side
with the engineer crushed at his post
beneath the furnace.
Crowd Quickly Gathers.
Crowds rushed up quickly, for the
crash had been heard for blocks through
the sleeping town. They saw that the
engine and tender had not parted. but
that the tender and one of the freight
cars lay hanging crafty over the side
of the elevated structure above.
Gorsky, himself flung free of the fall
ing, engine, but hurt about the thighs,
had run to the side of his pinioned
chief and was yelling frantically to his
train crew and the others in the throng
to pull the still conscious engineer from
beneath the red-hot furnace.
A call for physicians brought Drs.
Mulligan, Fewsmith and Deputy County
Physician Alters and they reached the
scene to find Reid still conscious and
suffering horribly beneath the crushing
weight of the furnace that was slowly
burning OFF his legs.
The doctors were not quite as help
less as the crowd. They made injec-
ton after injection Of opiates into his
body, and the anaesthetic partly re-
lieyed the terrible pain. But the wreck
ing train that had been sent for half
an hour before did not appear.
Fire from the burning Goals of the
furnace caught and famed up In the
oily wood OF the cab around the dying
(csntfnued ON Second Pass.3