27 September 2007
Dipping Into the Past
Locomotive lying on its side with wooden passenger cars
destroyed - Peel Region Archives.
Caledon Ontario 1907 - George Hodge and Matthew Grimes,
engineer and conductor of the train that was wrecked at the Horseshoe Curve in Caledon on 2 Sep 1907, for whose arrests on
charges of criminal negligence warrants were issued by Chief Coroner A.J. Johnson at the close of the inquest in Toronto last week,
were arrested by Chief Flintoff, of the Toronto Junction Police. They appeared before Magistrate Ellis, of Toronto Junction, on
Wednesday. Each was admitted to bail in his own and one other surety of $2,000 each. On Saturday, before Police Magistrate Crawford at
Brampton, they waived their right to a preliminary hearing, accepted the evidence given at the coroner's inquest and agreed to appear
for trial at the Peel fall assizes, which begin at Brampton before Justice Magee on 11 Nov 1907. The whole proceedings
occupied not more than five minutes.
An Ottawa despatch today says: "Wreck Inspector McCall of the Railway Commission, has reported on the CPR wreck at Caledon.
If the CPR does not undertake of its own accord to straighten the line at this point it will in all probability be ordered to do so by
the Railway Commission.
An article in the Sarnia Canadian says the Horseshoe Curve "is a relict of the railway boom of the 1870s, during which Ontario was
gridironed with a network of local railways built on a capital of wind and municipal bonuses. One of these schemes was the Toronto,
Grey & Bruce narrow gauge railway promoted by the late George Laidlaw of Toronto, and intended to run from Toronto to Owen Sound
with a branch to Kincardine. When the Township of Caledon was approached for a bonus the township attached a condition to its grant
that there had to be a station at the village of Charleston. To get Charleston on the road it was necessary to run the line up the
Caledon Mountain, which is the extension of the Niagara Escarpment, at a place where the ascent of the mountain would be a fair
proposition for a goat. The engineers did not like it, but the promoters needed the Caledon money, and to Charleston Mr. Laidlaw said
the road had to go. The engineers at last devised a scheme to get up the mountain by means of a horseshoe curve, which was then a new
idea in railroading, though the device has often been used in railway building in the western mountain country since. The original
bonus paid by the township must have been eaten up over and over again in the cost of the extra coal burned in the locomotives that
have climbed the Horseshoe grade since the 1870s."
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