4 minute read
The Gulf Stream Trestle
by Brian Swartz
A reputation as a killer
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Amistake could cost one dearly on the Gulf Stream Trestle, the steel railroad trestle that spanned a deep valley outside Bingham.
The Somerset Railway once linked Oakland with Rockwood on Moosehead Lake. The line reached Bingham in 1890. Fourteen years later, a major construction project drove the railroad northeast to the Rockwood Yard. Beyond Bingham, the Boston Bridge Co. leaped Gulf Stream Valley by constructing a steel trestle measuring seven hundred feet in length and one hundred and twenty-five feet high.
Unfortunately, the well-built trestle developed a reputation as a killer.
One cold winter morning, two lumberjacks decided to hike into Bingham by following the Somerset Railway from their logging camp. The excursion would take them downhill. They could catch the train back to camp later that day.
They started across the Gulf Stream Trestle, partially covered by new-fallen snow. Sheer terror gripped the lumberjacks moments later as they reached the halfway point. The southbound plow train, making its morning run, whipped around a curve and rumbled onto the trestle.
The lumberjacks panicked. One man threw himself outside a rail and lay with one shoulder and leg dangling over the edge. His companion leaped to his death.
“Leaving paint on the man’s sleeve,” the train missed the surviving lumberjack. The engineer apparently did not see the incident because the train did not stop. The frightened survivor climbed onto the deck and ran to Bingham to find help.
Yet another day, an engineer named John Vigue ran a northbound freight, Number 49, from Bingham toward Deadwater. The train, straining to handle the steep grade, swung into the trestle approaches.
“There’s a bear on the tracks!” Vigue suddenly shouted.
The startled fireman thrust his head out the window and saw a large black bear standing at the centerpoint of the trestle. Vigue was laying on the steam whistle. Confused by the ear-splitting whistle and probably frightened by the oncoming freight, the bear reviewed its alternatives and jumped to its death. As the bruin went overboard, Vigue felt his heart pounding in his throat. If the locomotive had hit the solidly built bear — well, bruin and train both might’ve gone off the trestle together.
One Saturday some years after the plow train swept a logger off the Gulf Stream Trestle, a depressed logger assigned to the camp at Deadwater bought a rope at Whitney’s Hardware in Bingham. On Sunday morning a rail inspector spotted a coat left neatly folded at a step-out built on the trestle after the first fatality had occurred there.
The inspector saw the coat again 24 hours later. He contacted a section crew that took a handcar to the trestle. Stepping gingerly onto the ties, the railroaders examined the coat, then found a knotted rope tied to the cross-brace. Someone tugged on the rope and discovered no resistance. Carefully hauling the rope upwards, the section crew found it broken. A glance over the parapet told them why.
Sometime during the night, the depressed logger had walked to the trestle from Bingham, bound his rope to the cross-brace, tied a knot around his neck, and jumped into the darkness. The rope had snapped and the logger smashed onto the rocks below the trestle. He was still breathing when the section crew reached him. A medical crew, a doctor, and a nurse drove a car from Bingham after the crew telephoned for
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help. Fashioning a rough stretcher, the doctor and section crew carried the suicide uphill to the track.
He soon died.
Sometime later, heavy runoff threatened to loosen a pier supporting the trestle. The Somerset Railway dispatched a repair crew, who brought bagged cement with them on a section car from Bingham. As two men lowered cement bags to the workers pouring cement at the pier footing, everyone moved slowly and carefully. Work was almost done when the crewmen stationed atop the trestle knotted a rope to the last cement bag.
As one man tried to move the sidecar, his companion leaned out to lower the bag. The rope apparently slipped in his grip. Desperately trying to snag the rope as the bag fell, the man probably leaned too far.
He screamed as he fell to his death.
In July of 1933 the Somerset Railway abandoned its Bingham-Rockwood track. Gulf Stream Trestle stood until 1976. Log trucks often crossed the span which had been subsequently decked with planking. No one else ever died on the cursed trestle, for it was torn down to not tempt fate again.
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