This story and photo appeared recently on eBay as an entry from an unnamed person (eBay user uniondepothotel). Thought you might be interested. I had to edit the photo to cover some "overlay" information.
George L.
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This is an extremely rare original 11 x 12 7/8†wide black and white cabinet photograph of what is the Bedford Belt Railway large wooden trestle that was located right near Bedford, Indiana. This is a trestle that not many photographs were made of due to its semi-remote area when it was built and in operation.
The photograph was taken by A. G. Bergen, who was a photographer located in Martinsville, Indiana. In this photograph, the wooden trestle appears to have all of the truss support work completed and all that was left was the laying of the upper deck, ties, and tracks. There are also ten (10) men on the bridge (with two on the lower level under the group of men on the top). There is also fresh Bedford stone that is used on the hillside, a rope going from the bridge over to a tree, and the photo looks to have been taken in the fall or winter, as there are just a few dried up leaves still on the trees. In this photo, you can clearly see the embankment rise from the gully below up to the track height, as well as, a partially obscured view of the other side.
The bridge itself was 70 feet high and 800 feet long. Sometime after the Bedford Belt came under the control of the CTH&SE, it appears that the Baltimore & Ohio gained control of it until it was abandoned circa, 1924.
Historically, the Bedford Belt Railroad began operations circa, 1890’s for operations in and around the Bedford, Indiana area. However circa, 1897, Midwest businessman and railroad magnet, John H. Walsh, acquired the Bedford Belt Railroad to basically connect his Southern Indiana Railroad (which was the original Evansville & Richmond Railroad) from Bedford to the company’s nearby stone quarries near what was to become the town of Oolitic. Walsh also needed the line not only to connect to the three quarries and ten mills, but as a needed economical way to get around the much higher rates that the Chicago Indianapolis & Louisville (Monon Route) was charging him.
It is not known if this was the trestle involved, but, “In April of 1896, tragedy struck on a trestle on the Bedford Belt line when it gave way taking the lives of many railroad train crews as a fast moving train was on it carrying several railroad men on the moving equipment. Five men were instantly killed and two others so badly hurt that they will die before night, in a bridge accident, half a mile from Bedford Junction, on the Belt Railroad, on which stone from the Bedford Junction quarry is transferred from one road to another. At nine o'clock this morning the train broke through the trestle.â€
â€The train consisted of an engine and two gravel cars and was running at a high rate of speed at the time of the accident. While passing over what is known as the Standard trestle, the last span from the direction of Bedford collapsed. The locomotive was at that time beyond the trestle, and had it not been pulled from the track by the weight of the cars behind it, the men on the engine would have escaped. As it was the two cars went down with the trestle in a ditch 75 feet deep, and the engine pulled backward in spite of the momentum of the train, rolled over and plunged down an embankment 75 feet high. All the men who were on the train were employees of the road and were engaged in ballasting the track. The breaking of the trestle will block the road for several days.â€
In 1905, the financial strain of over budgeting and two much expenditure by the Walsh Empire started to show. By 1908 all of the railroads that were owned by Walsh went bankrupt and their operations were transferred to a trustee in 1908. Walsh subsequently was sentenced to prison for wrongdoing. In two years from then, the three roads that were owned and operated by Walsh; the Chicago Southern, the Southern Indiana, and the Bedford Belt, were taken over by the Chicago Terre Haute & Southwestern Railroad. The CTH&SE later became under the control of the Chicago Milwaukee St. Paul & Pacific – Milwaukee Road.
