This week's Hagley Vault post documents a train wreck that occurred in February 1917 ...

This week's Hagley Vault post documents a train wreck that occurred in February 1917 in Mount Union, Pennsylvania. The accident occurred when the locomotive shown in this photograph, engine No. 614 carrying a freight train of coal cars, collided with the sleeper car of the Mercantile Express No. 6 passenger train.

The impact killed all twenty-one passengers aboard the sleeping car, sent coal cars tumbling down the rail embankment to the street below, and trapped those in the locomotive. Reportedly, the workers on the freight locomotive failed to see signals in a heavy fog.

This photograph shows the aftermath of the impact; a special relief train hauling a wreck crew was dispatched to the site from the Pennsylvania Railroad's Altoona Shops. The crew of the train included Pennsylvania Railroad Superintendent N.W. Smith, Division Engineer H.H. Russel, Freight Trainmaster J.B. Phelan, as well as physicians and and a coroner to address the needs of the living and the dead.

This image is from Hagley Library's collection of Pennsylvania Railroad negatives (Accession 1993.300), which contains more than 5,200 negatives from the Pennsylvania Railroad's corporate files. These negatives largely depict the company's trains, tracks, equipment, and facilities, although the collection also contains numerous views of facilities and equipment on other railroads, of nearby buildings and properties, or of standardized equipment and accessories that were collected by the company for reference.

The Pennsylvania Railroad was chartered in 1846 to complete an all-railroad network across the state. In 1857, the Pennsylvania Railroad purchased the old Main Line system and eventually brought the entire line from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh under one management. Between 1855 and 1874, the company underwent rapid expansion and emerged as one of the two largest railroad systems in the region east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio. By the time this image was captured, the Pennsylvania Railroad had become the largest railroad in the United States in terms of corporate assets and traffic. 

The negatives in this digital collection were digitized to positives to facilitate access, and have been made available in our Digital Archives. Click here to take a look!