Train Wreck in Brandtsville, PA in 1963

The black and white pictures in this collection were taken with a one minute developing Polaroid in 1963.  I still have this camera but the film is no longer available for it.   I will be doing an article some day on the camera.   The smudges on the picture were caused by touching them before the coating that you manually wiped on the picture after lifting it out of the camera was totally dry.  

They were taken about two days after a railroad accident at Brandtsville, a railroad station between Carlisle and Dillsburg PA.  At the time this was a busy track and the railroad quickly cleaned up enough to restore the track and get traffic moving again on one track.  This accounts for both the smoke coming from some of the wreckage, the crane and the piles of trucks in the one picture.  

Map from Google Earth

Looking at the map Carlisle is to the left and up, Dillsburg to the right and down.   The map is from Google Earth with a path drawn on it to show the area of the wreck.  This was the second wreck in this area in less than 10 years and there was another bad one some years later.  The road along the railroad track is called York Road.  It begins in York as Carlisle Road and passed through Rossville, Dover, Dillsburg and Brandtsville,  on it’s way to Carlisle.  In Rossville the name changes.   The building between the tracks and the York Road near the center of the picture is the old Brandtsville Railroad station.  These were not unusual in farm country.  Trains stopped for passengers, and to load and unload freight.  Brandtsville had a siding that cars could be pushed off on to allow the train to continue while they were unloaded and loaded.  That siding is still there, the switch still in the line to allow shunting off cars but a derailer sits on the siding to derail anything that would go on that track.  You would think that railroads would want to keep cars on the track not derail them.  But at one time the siding had a bumper, a device to stop a car if it got to the end.  That has rusted away and without it cars would just go off the end and out on the road if accidentally shunted there.  The bumper was replaced by the derailer.  Imagine coming across the bridge on York Road from Carlisle and have a railroad car come off the end of the siding in front of you.  It could ruin your whole day!