Notes on Railroad Accidents. Adams Charles Francis

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Railroads: their Origin and Problems, p. 49.

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A collision very similar to that at Camphill occurred upon the Erie railway at a point about 20 miles west of Port Jervis on the afternoon of July 15, 1864. The train in this case consisted of eighteen cars, in which were some 85 °Confederate soldiers on their way under guard to the prisoner's camp at Elmira. A coal train consisting of 50 loaded cars from the hanch took the main line at Lackawaxen. The telegraph operator there informed its conductor that the track was clear, and, while rounding a sharp reversed curve, the two trains came together, the one going at about twelve and the other at some twenty miles an hour. Some 60 of the soldiers, besides a number of train hands were killed on the spot, and 120 more were seriously injured, some of them fatally.

This disaster occurred in the midst of some of the most important operations of the Rebellion and excited at the time hardly any notice. There was a suggestive military promptness in the subsequent proceedings. "T. J. Ridgeway, Esq., Associate Judge of Pike County, was soon on the spot, and, after consultation with Mr. Riddle [the superintendent of the Erie road] and the officer in command of the men, a jury was impanneled and an inquest held; after which a large trench was dug by the soldiers and the railway employés, 76 feet long, 8 feet wide and 6 feet deep, in which the bodies were at once interred in boxes, hastily constructed – one being allotted to four rebels, and one to each Union soldier." There were sixteen of the latter killed.

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Chapter XIV, XVI.