The Clemson train wreck of 1965

A mighty clamor that sounded like an army of drunken giants banging on huge metal drums echoed across the dark waters of Lake Hartwell 50 years ago this spring.

The screeching of steel, the rumbling and clanging of hollow metal continued for what seemed like nearly a minute, rousing residents of Clemson from their sleep just after midnight April 7, 1965.

When the noise stopped, a hulking mass of crushed boxcars lay scattered along a quarter mile of railroad and spilled out onto the 250-foot Seneca River trestle that runs parallel to U.S. 123 at the Pickens-Oconee boundary.

Depending on which account you go by, between 34 and 37 boxcars had jumped the tracks, with at least one of them flying off the trestle and into the depths of the reservoir below. A red caboose had rumbled down the steep embankment and was partially submerged at the edge of the lake.

Related: Graniteville: 10 years later, deadly train wreck haunts SC town + photos

The No. 52 northbound train, on its way from Atlanta to Greenville, was a smoking, serpentine ruin.

It was a disaster scene unlike anything anyone had witnessed here before.

“Most of the cars jackknifed, plowed up several hundred feet of track and came to rest in a mountain of twisted track and mangled boxcars,” an Associated Press account of the wreck said the next day.

The engineer and three crew members escaped injury, but the loss was estimated at $500,000 – or nearly $4 million in today’s money.

The mess had barely been cleared away before calamity struck again.

On May 31, a freight train was clipped by a bulldozer working beside the tracks east of Easley. The lead locomotive was derailed and pushed out onto the Saluda River Trestle, where it caught fire and burned.

People began to wonder, when would the next one happen?

‘I never did that again’

At the time, George Lane was a 25-year-old graduate student at Clemson with a fondness for trains and a penchant for taking photos of them.

After the Great Train Wrecks of 1965, he was more cautious.

“I used to stand right next to the tracks and take pictures of these trains coming along at 60 and 70 miles an hour,” he said. “After that, I never did that again.”

The records of the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates train wrecks now, go back only as far as 1967, according to spokesman Keith Holloway, so the kind of documentation of railroad accident investigations we have now aren’t available for those crashes.

Since the Clemson wreck happened on the Oconee side of the lake, the Oconee County Sheriff’s Office was on the scene, news reports of the time said, but that agency’s records don’t go back that far, spokesman Jimmy Watt said.

The archives of Norfolk Southern Railway, the successor to Southern Railway, which ran both those trains, also don’t contain any reports of the 1965 wrecks, according to archivist Jennifer McDaid.

Norfolk Southern, which ships freight from coast to coast over a rail network nearly 20,000 miles long, stands on its safety record, according to spokeswoman Susan Terpay.

She points to statistics from the Federal Railroad Administration that show an 83 percent decline in train-motor vehicle collisions since 1972.

The railroad maintains its tracks on a regular basis, including a project that was just completed on the line between Easley and Liberty, she said. It involved removing and installing nearly 25,000 crossties, installing 18,000 tons of ballast and renewing the surfaces at 24 road crossings along a double-track section of railroad.

Some of the old crossties seen along the edge of the railroad in Easley while the project was going on appeared to be badly deteriorated.

“NS renews its rail line as part of its regular maintenance cycle about every six to seven years to ensure safety of operations,” Terpay said.

The railroad has not been disaster-free since the 1965 crashes, however.

The state’s most recent railroad catastrophe, 10 years ago in Graniteville, involved Norfolk Southern rolling stock and crew.

Nine people died when a toxic cloud of chlorine gas from a damaged railcar settled over the small Aiken County town, and people who were working at a nearby mill are still suffering breathing difficulties, The AP recently reported.

The accident was blamed on workers leaving a switch turned the wrong way.

‘It would have been a huge disaster’

Speculation as to what caused the 1965 Clemson wreck ranged from a broken axle to sabotage.

A Southern Railway detective told reporters at the scene that the possibility of sabotage was being investigated because of an attempt to derail a freight train near Seneca several months earlier, The AP reported at the time.

The railroad’s general manager was quoted in The Greenville News as saying excessive speed had been ruled out as a possible cause.

Longtime Clemson resident James M. Stepp says the story he heard was that an axle broke and one car’s leading end dropped onto the ties, dug in, and the rear cars piled up behind it.

The evidence he saw supports that theory.

“I remember one car was practically standing on end and there was a good-sized gouge or divot in the track bed,” he said. “The sudden stop snapped the front portion of the train, causing derailment of some cars still being pulled by the engines.

“These derailed cars were pulled across the bridge, tearing up the track and ties, with apparently one or two dumped into the lake.”

The Greenville News reported that one car “plunged into the water” and two others were missing and presumed to be in the lake.

The crash “severely damaged” the 1917-vintage trestle, The News reported.

More than half of the train’s 123 cars were in front of the derailment and remained on the tracks. They were taken on to Greenville, the newspaper reported. Others in the rear that were still upright were towed back to Seneca.

Although no one was hurt in the Clemson and Easley crashes 50 years ago, Lane recalls that the Crescent, a passenger train that still runs through Clemson on its way from New Orleans to New York City, was coming along not far behind the train that wrecked at Clemson.

“If it had been a passenger train, there would have been a lot of injuries,” he said. “It would have been a huge disaster.”

Because of its location and the magnitude of the wreckage, parallel to the four-lane highway that connects Clemson with Seneca, the Clemson derailment stands out in people’s memories.

“My grandparents’ house was on Pickens Street up from the depot,” said Clemson native Lynne Hamilton. “We were all shocked about a derailment.

“I have never seen such a mess since.”

The wreck stood out as one of the cataclysmic events of the mid-1960s, along with the assassination of President Kennedy and the burning of Clemson’s elementary school and downtown Methodist church in the mind of young residents like Michael Pilgrim.

“Sometimes I forget how eventful the ’60’s were and how much an impact all those events made on a young child,” he said.

‘I think of the wreck every time I cross the bridge’

For some, curiosity turned to opportunity.

Jerry Owens, who lived in Seneca at the time, said his dad and some of the men who worked for him “went down and got a bunch of Falstaff beer, as some of the cargo was beer.”

According to a report in The Greenville News the day after the wreck, the train’s cargo included lumber, cotton bales, paper products, lubricants, cement and clay, and steel pipes, which were “strewn along the roadbed.”

An article from an unidentified publication of the time tells of members of the Clemson Diving Club “salvaging valuable goods” from the underwater wreckage.

Donna Bradley says her dad, Jake Sanders, was called in to run one of the big cranes used to remove the cars from the lake. He had to drive it out onto the trestle to accomplish it.

“I was just 6 years old, but I think of the wreck every time I cross the bridge,” she said.

Fewer people have clear memories of the other wreck, near Easley, but it left a mark in the world of mathematics because of the way it bent long sections of rail into a sine-generated curve.

A textbook from the University of California-Berkeley describes the accident and the phenomenon.

“A catstrophic example of a sine-generated curve on a much larger scale was provided by the wreck of a Southern Railway freight train near Greenville, S.C., on May 31, 1965,” it says.

“Thirty adjacent flatcars carried as their load 700-foot sections of track rail chained in a bundle to the car beds. The train, pulled by five locomotives, collided with a bulldozer and was derailed.

“The violent compressive strain folded the trainload of rails into a drastically foreshortened snakelike configuration. The elastic properties of the steel rails tended to minimize total bending exactly as in the case of the spring-steel strip, and as a result the wrecked train assumed the shape of a sine-generated curve that distributed the bending as uniformly as possible.”

Lane, the photographer, says mathematicians were able to figure out how fast the train was going by the curvature.

Workers had to go in with welding torches and cut those rails into pieces to haul them away, he said. “After that, they were useless.”

As for the Saluda River trestle, there were concerns about its safety after the wreck, Lane said.

But 50 years later, trains continue to rumble over it every day.

This story was originally published May 27, 2015 at 12:30 PM with the headline "The Clemson train wreck of 1965."