I obtained End of the Line: The 1857 Train Wreck at the Desjardins Canal Bridge by Don McIver as an interloan from the Hamilton Public Library. The title and cover art do a good job showing what happened. In addition to the locomotive, two passenger cars crashed through the bridge spanning the Desjardins Canal near Hamilton, Ontario. A faulty axle on the locomotive broke, sending the wheels off the tracks and over the bridge. It plunged sixty feet to the frozen canal, taking the first passenger car with it which somersaulted down and landed on its roof. The second car, as illustrated, did not plummet to the ground and dangled at a 90° angle, throwing all of its passengers in a pile at the front of the car. Sixty people perished.
McIver writes about the accident immediately so this book was not like an aircraft disaster movie where you sit through two hours before anything happens. The first fifty pages were exciting with rescue stories and survivor testimonials. McIver supplemented the text with paintings and drawings and some of the earliest ever photos yet, oddly, no reproductions of newspaper stories about the accident. That left the remaining three quarters of the book to be spent on southern Ontario railroad history, the movers and shakers in the railroad industry, and Canadian politics. It became a boring read where too much detail was devoted to railroad executives. I didn’t get interested again until the final chapter on the inquest.