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Suicide Bridge Trestle Nixon Creek

GunnieSacked

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Oct 27, 2024
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Nanaimo
IMG_2665.jpegIMG_2666.jpegIMG_2667.jpegIndustrial Timber Mill built Suicide bridge in 1934.

The trestle consisted of the upper railway deck supported by a series of so-called “bents,” each featuring up to six vertical piles, cross-hatched with support beams for greater strength.
The spring 1986 edition of Whistle Punk, a now-defunct publication of the BC Forest History Magazine, reveals how Suicide Bridge got its name. Through death, yes, but not suicide.

(A whistle punk was a worker who sounded the steam whistle to signal it was time to pull fallen logs from the forest).

During construction, one worker was “bucking wood for the steam shovel” when the “skyline” cable snapped and killed him.

The next day a second worker died in a cable accident.

And two days later, a log rolled on top of a third man and killed him.

Three deaths in four days — a tragic testament to the lack of safety rules that characterized early railway construction.

“All were preventable, if people had been more careful,” Tandberg says.

(As fate would have it, tragedy dogged the railway logging industry to the bitter end. Western Forest Products closed Vancouver Island’s last such railway after a derailment near Woss killed three workers and injured two others in 2017.)

Article and pictures are from; The Ghost Hunter, Norm Tandberg .
 
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