Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
On Friday, 27 June, I posted videos of two performances of the classic railroad ballad, “The Wreck of Old 97.” The song tells the story of the speeding Southern Railway mail train that ran off the Stillhouse Trestle near Danville, VA, in 1903, killing eleven.
But the song’s account of the wreck has some flaws, beginning with the first verse:
They gave him his orders in Monroe, Virginia,
Said, Steve you’re way behind time,
This isn’t 38, this is Old 97,
You must put her into Spencer on time.
The song asserts that engineer Joseph “Steve” Broady was instructed to crack open the throttle to make up for lost time. Actually, he was given what were known as slow orders. The track ahead was not clear. Northbound trains had to be shunted onto sidings while Old 97 steamed through, so Broady had to follow the railroad’s time table. As he started down the grade to the Stillhouse Trestle, he had made up only two minutes of the hour his train was behind.
Broady didn’t need to make up another 58 minutes. Knowing the mail train was an hour late, the Southern Railway had already dispatched another mail train to Atlanta. It wouldn’t be carrying mail from Washington, D.C., but it would pick up mail along the tracks and reach Atlanta on time, thus obviating a penalty for arriving late. Broady simply needed to maintain the schedule in his orders.
So why did he jump the tracks and dive off the 15-mph trestle at more than 60 mph? The song provides a clue:
It’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville,
It’s a line on a three mile grade,
It was on that grade that he lost his airbrakes,
You can see what a jump he made.
Broady knew the road to Danville. He’d driven freight trains down it day and night. But he’d never run a passenger train down it, let alone a four-car mail train. In his 2010 book, The Wreck of the Old 97, Danville historian Larry Aaron surmises that Broady was unprepared for the differing braking performances of long, heavy freight trains, and light, fast mail trains. The brakes were on the cars, so a slight application of braking that quickly slowed a freight had very little effect on the four or five cars of a fast mail.
On Old 97, Broady may have approached the Danville grade with depleted compressed air reservoirs, having braked more aggressively than he was accustomed to braking, in addition to waiting too long to apply the brakes. He certainly knew he had to slow to 15 mph to cross the trestle safely. But when he applied his brakes, he found he’d “whittled” down his air supply, that he had no brakes, and that his train was out of control, gathering speed down a hill ending in a curved slow speed trestle. He may have reversed his driving wheels in a desperate but futile attempt to slow to a safe speed. Computer models run by engineers at Virginia Tech suggest Old 97 jumped the track doing 80–84 mph, and dived off the trestle at 75 mph.
Tradition and one of the greatest railroad ballads every written assign the accident to ruthlessness by the railroad and recklessness by Steve Broady. Aaron’s thorough modern investigation assigns the accident to inadvertence and lapses in judgment. The wreck of the Old 97 was the work of mistaken mortals, not knaves and fools.
But it’s still a good song, still a good story. Again, here are versions by Johnny Cash and The Seekers: