This picture shows the aftermath of an accident that occurred on February 28, 1902, at Couch Creek, Ga., about 39 miles south of Atlanta on what is now the Atlanta division. Engineer Allen Mat thews took engine 1002 and a three-car passenger train south that evening. Due to a washout farther down the line, he had orders to tie up at Williamson, five miles beyond Couch Creek. Shortly before his train reached the trestle, a mill dam upstream gave way and flood waters washed out part of the trestle. The train went off the middle of the trestle and plunged into the water.
It took three weeks to get No.1002 up out of the mud and water. In a story told to H. G. Monroe and published in Railroad Stories in November 1935, W. C. "Cap" White, the Southern Railway man who directed the work, called it the "biggest little job I ever had." They had to put cofferdams around the sunken engine, change the course of the creek when the water got low enough, and put five boilers and pumps in the swamp to get the water out. This picture was apparently taken after the engine was chained up out of the mud onto a temporary track to get it back to the main line.
Steaming over the Southern's Lake Pontchartrain Trestle, train No.44 was on its way to New Orleans when this picture was made in 1912. The picture was contributed by Mrs. S. W. Fortenberry, agent for the railway at Pearl River, La.
