The "My Summertime Swimming Hole Made The News" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading online stories in the archives of the Lancaster Newspaper.  Searching for nothing in particular when I pulled up a story from Saturday, February 20, 1960.  The headline on page one read: 17 Mail Cars Wrecked, 2 Topple In Creek at Water Works Bridge."  Another, smaller headline under the lead story read: "Train Crash Heard Two Blocks Away."  I can only imagine the turmoil that existed that morning along the Conestoga River.  

Favorite swimming hole which shows the tracks of the
main line in the distance. Click on images to enlarge.

 A Pennsylvania Railroad mail express train going 50 miles an hour jumped the tracks and sent 14 mail cars hurtling down a 50-foot embank- ment near the City Water Works at 8:27 a.m. that Saturday morning.  Two of the cars landed in the Conestoga River under the huge stone bridge along Grofftown Road.  The other cars were strewn, twisted and battered, along an embankment.  The cars that went into the river snapped a 12,000 volt Pennsylvania Power and Light line and left seven industries and about 100 homes without power for an hour and seven minutes.  

Train cars can be seen derailed next to the bridge.

Lancaster's pumping station was shut down for 22 minutes.  The longer I read the more I realized that could have happened while I was swimming in the water beneath the bridge had it been a few months earlier.  I would have been a sophomore at Manheim Township High School at the time and had my driver's license for a few months and may have loaded a few of my neighbor- hood friends into my '53 Henry J  and had driven to the bridge to swing on the large rope that hung from the bridge above the water.  We spent many a day in the summer swimming at the Water Works, under the bridge where rail traffic was just taken for granted.   

More rail cars lie burst open near Conestoga River.

Of the 25 cars in the train, 17 were derailed with one hanging perilously above the water, along the side of the bridge.  The noise from the crash was heard close to a mile away on the north side of neighboring Grand View Heights.  One woman living on Pleasure Road reported that it sounded as if it was a block away.  The accident knocked out power to the surrounding area.  Those that came to view the accident told of one man who was still shaking; he was just about to go under the bridge when the accident happened.   

 Postal cars strewn down banks next
to bridge over the Conestoga River.

A passenger train was halted due to the accident and passengers on that train, who had planned to get off in Lancaster, had to walk the couple of miles into Lancaster.  Pennsylvania Railroad set up a bypass between Parkesburg and Columbia for later trains.  A shuttle bus service began to operate to take patrons from the Lancaster Train Station to Columbia so they could get on a different train.  The train that was behind the mail train and was halted by the accident, had to be backed up over 22 miles to Parkesburg so passengers could be detoured on another train to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  Luckily the tracks could be repaired quickly for trains later that evening.  The four crewman who were running the mail train were not injured.  Lancaster City and Manheim Township police department were kept busy keeping the crowd away from the accident scene.  On page 2 of the newspaper was another story with the headline: "All Mail on Derailed Train to Be Delivered."  

Sorting through the mail that was found.

After viewing the photo- graphs in the newspaper, I thought the headline to be rather humorous, since much of the mail was strewn around the edge of the river and how much lost in the river was anyone's guess.  This is one event that I had very little memory of, since I must have been no more than a mile away working at the Lancaster Shopping Center at the time.  Reading the story in the newspaper today gave me a first-time glance of that train accident years and years ago. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.