Ramsey County History – Summer 2003: “Fog and the Dark of an October Night—The Fabled Wreck of the ‘Ten Spot’ in Its Plunge Twenty-five Feet to the Mississippi Below”

Fog and the Dark of an October Night—The Fabled Wreck of the ‘Ten Spot’ in Its Plunge Twenty-five Feet to the Mississippi Below
Author: David Riehle

Shortly before 6 a.m.. on October 15, 1912, with the landscape covered in a dense fog, a bridge tender on the Terminal Bridge heard a long blast from a riverboat. It was a signal requesting that he open the swing bridge over the Mississippi River south of St. Paul. The bridge tender blew back to say “all right” and then sent a horn message to tell the approaching train to wait. But, unfortunately, the engine, known as “Ten Spot,” went forward and plunged downward into the river. No one knows exactly what happened, and there were varying versions of this tragic accident. Perhaps the train engineer mistook the messages, or the engine’s air brakes failed. Some railroaders believed the Ten Spot was a bad luck machine, and that was the cause of the wreck.
PDF of Riehle article