THE KENDAL TRAIN CRASH

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the worst rail disaster in Jamaica’s history, the Kendal Crash. On September 1, 1957, a train traveling from Montego Bay to Kingston with 1600 passengers derailed its tracks in the vicinity of Kendal in Manchester. 200 persons died and another 500 were injured in the accident. The majority of the passengers on board were members of the Holy Name Society of St. Anne’s Roman Catholic Church in Kingston. They were returning from an all day excursion in Montego Bay where they had had a big meeting and a picnic. The rest of the passengers included 100 criminals along with regular commuters.

Accounts of the accident indicate that on approaching Kendal, the train was traveling at a considerable speed while approaching a big bend. Suddenly, there was a jolt and the train began to sway. On realizing that the train was in trouble, the driver made three blasts of the whistle to signal that there was something wrong with the train. Shortly afterwards, the train picked up speed and the driver lost control of it, subsequently resulting in the train being derailed.

News of the accident spread quickly and people hastened to the scene. Descriptions of the scene after the crash given by witnesses and survivors of the crash were all horrific. Body parts were seen all over the crash site, sometimes wrapped around metal from the train. Bodies which were flung from the ten wrecked coaches lay motionless on the ground or in some cases, hung from the wreckage. However, not everyone who went to witness the scene had honourable intentions, as there were numerous reports of looting and robbing. People were seen stripping the victims of the crash of their jewellery and other valuables. After the wreckage was sorted through and the survivors rescued, the bodies of the dead were laid out on an embankment so that they could be identified by relatives.

At the time of the accident, no cause for the accident was known, so, the Railway Commission of Enquiry investigated the accident to ascertain one. Investigations revealed several causes. The immediate cause was attributed to the accidental closure of an angled wheel (brake) cock which had been placed incorrectly. However, some survivors reported that it was the criminals who were behaving boisterously on the train who had interfered with the cock. This allegation was never confirmed. Other causes identified included the driver’s speeding, the unsatisfactory maintenance of the brake equipment and the overcrowding of the coaches (maximum capacity of each coach was 80 persons but on that fateful day each coach had approximately 130 passengers).

In the aftermath of the Kendal crash, people lost faith in the Railway Service so, for a while, the number of commuters decreased significantly. In 2001, a monument in commemoration of the victims of the crash was erected at a new cemetery in Spanish Town. One survivor of the tragedy, Shirley Graham-Paul, donated to the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ) in March 2007, the ticket she had used to board the train. The donation formed part of the scheduled events planned by the Museum of History and Ethnography, a Division of the IOJ, as a retrospective.

References

1. “Kendal Crash survivor donates to the IOJ on 50th anniversary.” The Sunday Gleaner, March 18, 2007, pg. B13.

2. Railway Catastrophe at Kendal. <http://www.nlj.org.jm/docs/history.htm#kendal> 14 June 2007.

3. Tragedy at Kendal – 1957. <http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/history/story009.html> 14 June 2007.