The Tale of Train Wrecks & Mississauga Miracles

There are many Mississaugans who remember the great train derailment that took place 30 years ago this week. But in many ways, another train accident on the same line, 25 years earlier could have been much worse.

The accident of St. Patrick’s Day 1954, at Dixie Road, was no mere one-train derailment. This accident involved two trains, and a truck carrying wet concrete. One of the trains was filled with passengers. But the real fear set in when the fire department finally received notice from Canadian Pacific Railway, about an hour after the collision, that the other train – a westbound freight – was hauling industrial dynamite. The aging locomotive that hauled the freight train was, like all steam locomotives, a high-pressure iron boiler of superheated steam. If it ruptured, it could take with it the explosive contents of the boxcars 12 and 13 down the 40-car train.

The door of the first of these two TNT-laden freight cars was sheared off by the passing passenger train, which skidded 300 metres before finally coming to rest with its front wheels off the tracks and a trainload of passengers in shock – eight of them in serious enough condition to be taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital – St. Joseph’s in Toronto. (The accident was a shot in the arm for residents in South Mississauga who were raising money, at the time for a hospital in Mississauga.) Passengers with minor injuries were tended to by Dr. John Speck when he arrived on the scene from Cooksville. The crewmen of the freight train were amongst those treated on the scene. They jumped from the cab of their derailed locomotive when they saw the passenger train bearing down on them.

It all started at 10:15 in the morning. Gordon Sutton was driving his cement truck northbound on Dixie Road when he crossed the tracks and was hit head on. The train jolted to a dead stop after Sutton’s truck wedged under the train. Before engineer William Palmer could radio officials at CP’s yard in Runnymede, an eastbound “Dayliner” – filled mostly with commuters – crashed into the back end of the truck where it stuck out from underneath the pilot wheel of the steam locomotive. This forced the diesel into the freight train, where it sideswiped the cars carrying explosives.

The Dixie Derailment was no less miraculous than the later train derailment that has come to be known as the Mississauga Miracle. It was truly divine intervention that many of the passengers in the Dixie Derailment alighted the train without injuries. When the two-coach diesel train came to a sudden halt, it was passing through town at 80 km/h. (By this time, trains didn’t stop at Dixie anymore). And there was no locomotive to cushion the passengers in the coaches behind, from the blow of the collision. The passengers were right up front, riding in a self-propelled Rail Diesel Car.

Despite the fact that the wig-wag signals were wagging away, Sutton was found not guilty of dangerous driving even though he admitted in his court testimony that he floored his cement truck in an effort to beat the freight train to the crossing, not realizing that two tracks crossed Dixie Road here and that a passenger train was speeding along the other track.

In one sad way, the Dixie Derailment was a greater tragedy than the 1979 derailment. There were no deaths 30 years ago. In the 1954 accident, a 69 year old passenger aboard the train died.

But after the sparks from the careening passenger train subsided, in the Dixie incident, there was never any real threat that the freight train’s explosive cargo would ignite.

Gordon Bentley was on the scene 25 years later, on November 10, 1979 when the threat of a toxic chlorine leak sent almost a quarter million people in Mississauga and Oakville from their homes, after 25 tank cars skipped the rails near Mavis Road.

The fire trucks arrived just minutes after the derailment. It was barely past midnight by then and in the following hours of darkness, the Peel Region police managed to evacuate the neighbourhood while Gordon and his crew put together an interim strategy to keep the situation from getting worse until they could determine just how big a crisis lay strewn along the tracks in front of them.

Just like the 1954 accident in Dixie, with its load of dynamite, Bentley waited anxiously for over an hour while CP Rail managers (in Agincourt, this time) scrambled to find a manifest that could confirm what dangerous petrochemicals, if any where aboard the train, and where they were. I won’t bother to fill in the details here. The person who can best tell the story is retired fire chief Bentley, and he’ll be at the Texaco Room of the Port Credit library next Thursday, November 12 to do just that.

Bentley was in charge when Train 54 left the rails, and he’ll have a presentation of images and stories of his experiences that night. I encourage you to join me next Thursday to hear the tale of the Mississauga Miracle from a man with a unique and intimate perspective on the event and its aftermath.

It’s a free presentation, but seating at the Texaco Room is limited so please come early. For more information, contact Fiona at 905-615-4860, ext. 2113.