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Ashtabula River Railroad Disaster

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on April 27, 2008 at 11:09:34 pm
 

Ashtabula River Railroad Disaster

Page editor Jessica LaRoque

 


Location

 

See general comments on main page

 

  • Bridge over a gorge of the Ashtabula River in Ashtabula, Ohio, just outside the town center.
  • The double track railroad bridge crossed seventy feet over the river below. At the location of the bridge, the river is shallow at 3-4 feet.
  • The latitude of Ashtabula is 41.873N.
  • The longitude is -80.785W.
  • See a satellite image of the current bridge from Google Maps here: Ashtabula River Railroad Bridge.
  • The Ashtabula drains into Lake Erie at Ashtabula, Ohio. See Ashtabula River on Wikipedia here.

 

History

 

  • Deadliest bridge collapse in United States history.
  • Built from 1863 and 1865.
  • The bridge collapsed in 1876, after eleven years of use.
  • Howe truss define supported by two abutments.
  • The designers of the bridge later commited suicide. I believe you repeat this later

 

 

 

Details of the Collapse

 

  • December 29, 1876, 7:28PM, during a snowstorm that left two feet of snow and produced 40 mile per hour winds.
  • The bridge had been in use for eleven years. This is a repeat
  • As the train crossed the bridge, the entire span collapsed, sending eleven railcars and one locomotive into the creek below. The first locomotive, "Socrates," just completed the crossing the bridge, and was the only car that did not fall. The conductor of the Socrates watched the rest of the train fall and sounded his whistle to alert people at the station.
  • The train that fell in the collapse was a Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway train, The Pacific Express, no.5. It was travelling with eleven railcars, two locomotives, and 159 passengers and crew.
  • Some railcars hit each other mid-fall, some fell first and were crushed by cars landing on top of them. After the collapse into the icy river, the oil lamps and coal heating stoves in the railcars ignited sending the cars up into a blaze.
  • Of the 159 passengers and crew, 64 were injured and 98 died, of which 48 were unrecognizable. Many were burned alive in the flaming railcars. The cars were left to burn, even after the fire department arrived, and there was some question of why the railroad officials had firemen help the wounded that were already out of the wreck rather than put out the fire. Community members saw survivors in the wreckage and used pails to try and douse the fire.
  • Although the train was only 100 yards from the station, the responders to the accident were unable to help much due to the storm and location. The cars had collapsed 70 feet down a steep gorge covered in two feet of snow, and were on fire. This is a repeat.

 

 

 

 

About the bridge design

 

  • Bridge had two abutments, on one each side of the gorge, which supported a 150 feet long wrought iron Howe Truss.
  • The Howe Truss was very strong over long spans. It was very popular for railroad bridges because of this and because it was much easier to construct that competing designs of the time. The Howe Truss was usually built using a combination of iron and wood for different elements.
  • The Howe Truss is named for William Howe, who developed the Howe Truss in the 1840s with his brothers-in-law, Amasa Stone, Azariah Boody, and Daniel Harris.
  • Iron railroad bridges were still uncommon in the 1850s. Most were wooden or a combination of iron and wood.
  • At the time the bridge was built, structural analysis was still developing, standard design specifications did not exist, and engineers were largely unaware of the phenomenon of material fatigue and brittle fractures.
  • Amasa Stone, president of the Cleveland, Painsville, and Ashtabula Railroad, designed the concept for the bridge. It is unclear why he chose to make the bridge completely of iron, however he was known to have a dominating personality and may have wanted to innovate. Also, his brother was a partner in the company that was providing the iron beams for the bridge.
  • Joseph Tomlinson prepared detailed specificaition drawings. Stone and Tomlinson later testified that Stone's intention was to make a first-class bridge.
  • Tomlinson and Stone disagreed about some specifications for the stress allowable on compression elements that led to Tomlinsons resignation or firing: Tomlinson wanted a smaller allowable stress than what Stone preferred. Tomlinson also later testified that iron that came from the mill was not the full size specified, but that it was used anyway.

 

 

Sequence of Events

 

 

 

Cause of the Collapse

 

  • Investigating engineers found the failure occured in the second and third panels of the south truss, with either the top chord or the compressive brace initiating the failure.
  • The legislature's investigating committee determined that the load was appropriate for the bridge, but that due to the faulty design a collapse would have occured eventually.
  • Investigating engineers determined the design was faulty in several aspects:
    • The Howe system itself. While the engineers concluded that it was possible to make a safe Howe Truss bridge, they determined that the Ashtabula bridge was excessively heavy.
    • The compressive diagonal braces were different sizes mixed together. The separate I beams were not tied together continuously, the end bearings were faulty, and there were no positive mechanical connections between the braces and the angle blocks to prevent movement of the ends of the braces.
    • The compressive top chords were also mixed sizes and not tied together correctly. They were bent by train weight and were only braced laterally at every other panel point.
    • The x-bracing in several areas was inadequate.
    • The angle block castings should have been continuous.
  • The engineers concluded that the failure was not due to defective iron or sudden cold weather. Rather, the bridge collapse was blamed on bridge construction that was not in line with well established engineering principles.
  • The specific cause of the collapse was a fatigue crack that originated at a small air hole and grew with repeated stress over eleven years. The strength of that component of the bridge was reduced by the cold weather and the weight of the train caused a brittle crack to form, in turn causing the bridge to collapse.

 

 

 

Collapse Outcomes

 

  • The media refers to the event as "The Ashtabula Horror."
  • By Jauary 18, a wooden replacement bridge was in place and carrying traffic.
  • January, 17, 1877 Ohio state legislature appoints a joint committee to investigate the cause(s) of the accident. An engineer also conducted an investigation on behalf of the coroner's jury in Ashtabula. A third investigation was conducted on behalf of the American Society of Civil Engineers. All three investigations came to similar conclusions, however the final ASCE investigating engineer, Charles MacDonald, was the only investigator to notice a flaw in a cast iron block. He concluded that the faulty iron lug had an air hole which reduced its strength by half.
  • MacDonald and later engineers determine that the bridge probably would have continued service without issue if there had been no casting flaw.
  • Investigating committees in essense blame Amasa Stone for the failure, never mentioning the iron casting flaw in their judgements.
  • Charles Collins, chief engineer for the railroad, commits suicide after testifying for the legislature's joint committee.
  • Six years later, Amasa Stone also commits suicide.
  • By 1888, cast iron is forbidden for use in bridges.
  • The entrepreneurial tradition of bridge building by railroad companies is called into question.
  • The joint committee drafted recommendations including design codes, design loads, allowable stresses, minimum strengths, expert design review, construction supervision, and periodic inspection by engineers. These recommendations were not passed into law.
  • Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway loses $495,722 due to the collapse. explain how it caused such great losses, profit, equipment, etc
  • Lasting impact: realization of need for standard specifications for bridges, need for qualified consulting engineers, need for an evaluation on the reliability of iron castings.

 

 

Photo/Video/Personal Accounts

 

References

1. Engineering/bridge design definitions from Virginia Tech: http://filebox.vt.edu/users/rkoors/definitions.htm.

2. History of Bridge Building, Howe Truss information.

3. Gasparini, Dario A. Collapse of ashtabula bridge on December 29, 1876. Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities (ASCE). May 1993 (2):7, 109-125.

4. Bridge Disaster Timeline, Ashtabula Railway Historical Foundation.

5. Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway. Corporate Stockholder Report, 1877.

6. Delatte, Norb. Maintenance and Management Lessons Learned from Bridge Collapses. Prepared for the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, 2007. Paper #07-2306. Abstract and retrieval information here.

 

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