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On the Trail (Track?) of the Blue Comet By Mark Stutzbach November 2014 Originally published in Weird N.J. May-October 2015 Made another pass on the edit here! I looked at the sheet of paper in my hand from Geocaching.com again. It said “As the dirt road bends left, the trailhead goes straight, as the road would if it went straight.” Trailhead? The dirt road did veer to the left. If I head straight at that point I will be pushing my way through dense brambles, closely packed bushes, and swamp. But if I stop here, this report is toast, I thought. I decided to push on. The description said the tracks were 50 to 60 feet from the dirt road. I did not have a compass to keep me straight, but I did have a waypoint record on my phone of where my car was parked. So I was in no danger of becoming hopelessly lost, unless my phone ran out of battery of course. I counted my steps and tried to go as straight as I could, but small trees and thick undergrowth made going straight very hard. I pushed on and by step counting I had travelled over 100 feet. I decided to turn back. The brush was so thick it was hard to see where I had come from so I turned around from where I was and tried to head straight back. Or so I thought. After crashing through more thick brush I stepped on what I thought was a moss bank and sank. I felt the water rush into my shoes. I was in a marshy pool 4 or 5 feet across and the water was halfway up to my knees. I have to keep going. But I felt hopelessly lost and wet. On the Trail of the Blue Comet Page 1 of 14 I looked up to see if I could see the return dirt road through the bush, but a few feet away there was the railroad tracks! So much for heading back to the car. I waded through the pool and stepped up on to the elevated tracks. Before moving on I found a curved stick to place on the rails. Across from the stick there was some wood debris. This marker along with the debris will give me some idea of where to leave the tracks to return to the car. It will be important for me to find this place again. Even though I could find the direction of the car, if I left the tracks at the wrong place, I would have much more thick brush and swamp to crash/wade through. I already had my fill of that. My curved stick bread crumb. The wreck of the Blue Comet is straight ahead to the west. For as far as I could see ahead the abandoned railroad tracks stretched on. Small cut trees and other trees randomly left standing growing through the tracks made walking the tracks a bit more difficult. Someone, for some unknown reason, spent a good amount of time cutting the small trees down and leaving others. I checked my phone and the GeoCache was straight ahead to the west, a half a mile away. From my research online I know this cache was located very close to the where the Blue Comet train derailed in 1939. The abandoned Blue Comet rail line On the Trail of the Blue Comet Page 2 of 14 I thought of the story of the Blue Comet as I walked down the rails to the west towards the scene of the accident. In 1929 the Blue Comet train was created by the Central Railroad of New Jersey. The Roaring Twenties were fading. It was a period of prosperity and optimism with advances in technology, culture, and social practices. On February 21, 1929 the spectacular Blue Comet train made its first three hour run between Jersey City and Atlantic City, NJ. To get to the Blue Comet station New York travelers would have to take the ferry across the Hudson to make the trip. Still the trip to Atlantic City could be made in under three hours. Given traffic, this feat is still hard to match today. The train was created to compete with the Pennsylvania Railroad for Atlantic City passengers. The twist was to provide near luxury accommodations with reserved seating at a price even the not so well off could afford. Round trip tickets to Atlantic City cost only $8.40. Everything about the train was designed to be eye pleasing down to the color theme, sea blue and cream to give the riders a taste of what was to come. And to directly please the taste, good reasonably priced food was provided in the dining car. You could buy a full-course dinner with upscale entrée choices for $1.25. The train also featured specials like the Blue Comet Dinner for a very affordable $.75. The Blue Comet Logo The Blue Comet name came from the primary blue color of the train and the comet inference of speed. Each of the cars were named after a real comet. On the Trail of the Blue Comet Page 3 of 14 The train routinely traveled at seventy miles per hour, but was capable of more to make up lost time when needed. The Blue Comet was an immediate success. And the victim of very bad timing, it ran smack into the Great Depression and the emergence of the automobile as a practical means of transportation. Also the Pennsylvania Railroad had direct access to New York City, making that route a bit more convenient without the need for a ferry ride. By the closing of the 1930s the Blue Comets end time was near. Another event would hasten the demise of the proud Blue Comet. On August 19th 1939 the Blue Comet left Union Station in Atlantic City bound northward at 3:35 PM. Besides the Engine and a tender fuel car, five comet named cars were in tow. There were two coach cars, the D’Arrest and the Winnecki, a combination coach and freight car the Halley, an observation car the Beila, and a diner car the Giacobini. On that day a once in a generation summer storm dumped over 13 inches of rain on southern New Jersey. The Blue Comet crew was warned to look out for heavy sand deposits on the crossings. The conductor and engineer held the throttle back to cruise between 35 to 40 miles per hour to reduce the risk to the train and its passengers at crossings and limited visibility situations. About a mile past the Chatsworth station two twenty four inch drainage pipes were installed in the two swampy areas surrounding Mile Post Eighty Six to facilitate natural drainage from the nearby cranberry bogs. It was thought also most of the water would drain naturally flowing along the raised tracks until it would reach the creek flowing into Chatsworth Lake a half mile away. But on that day the two culverts were overwhelmed by the deluge. Water had collected to extreme levels and ran across the tracks sweeping the Pine Barren sand from under the tracks. The culvert to the west of Mile Post Eighty Six was the most over whelmed by the storm as it handled most of the bog drainage and was further from the creek to the east. Just past this culvert and Mile Post eighty Six was where the Blue Comet passengers and crew felt the sick feeling of a drop in the tracks. The engine was heavy enough to stay in contact with the tracks and traveled far past the point of derailment before it could stop. The five trailing cars all derailed and were spread over tracks, all off the track and listing at precarious angles near a clearing on the north side of the tracks. The passengers feared being dumped into the swamp but luck was with them that day as the cars did not topple over. The entire area was covered by water. Some Quotes from the 1939 Philadelphia Inquirer account of the disaster: "The suspense when the train started to lean was terrific. Everyone began to scream, thinking it would overturn in the water beside the tracks." On the Trail of the Blue Comet Page 4 of 14 "I was thrown to the end of the car and practically everything, including tables, chairs, and a flood of broken glass, smothered me." Word of the crash spread quickly and rumor escalated the carnage to 100 bodies spread around the crash site. First responders rushed to the scene from all over the area. The reality was there were only 49 people aboard most of which were injured, some serious. The worst injuries were to the diner car Chef Joseph L. Coleman. When the diner car, named the Giaccobini, overturned the hot stove rolled on top Joseph, crushing and scalding him. These injuries proved fatal. He was the only casualty of the train wreck. The train was cleared from the scene and all cars were repaired and returned to service except the Diner car Giaccobini. Like Joseph, the Giaccobini would no longer be a part of the Blue Comet legend. The track was repaired quickly and the Blue Comet was back in service within a few days Unfortunately the wreck was the harbinger of the end of the line for the Comet. On September 12, 1941 the Blue Comet crashed into a delivery truck at a crossing with no watchman or crossing signal and killed a mother and her two young daughters.
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