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Stand on the Bayonne waterfront on a warm, clear September morning and look west across Newark Bay. Container ships slide toward Port Newark, and the Turnpike’s big steel arch hangs in the haze beyond them.
What you will not see is the thing that once owned this water: a two-mile, four-track railroad lift bridge so massive that its two spans were each split into a pair of draws that could be raised independently, letting a barge slip through one gap while trains still crossed another. That bridge is gone now, torn out in pieces over three decades, and most of the people driving the Turnpike Extension have no idea it was ever there.
On September 15, 1958, at one minute past ten in the morning, that bridge swallowed a commuter train. Forty-eight people never came home. A third coach, car number 932, hung off the open span at a sickening angle for two full hours before it too slid into the bay, and by then photographers had already caught the number stenciled on its side.
The following day, that same number came in on the Hudson County numbers game, and one bookmaker in Jersey City paid every winner in full. His name was Joseph Vincent Moriarty, though everyone in the Horseshoe knew him as Newsboy.
This is the story of a mystery that still has no last chapter, a highway of iron that New Jersey chose to erase, and a loner in a cheap suit who kept millions in the trunk of a rusting Plymouth.
A Monday train that should have been ordinary
Train No. 3314 was a Jersey Central run that began at Bay Head Junction, climbed up the Shore line, and crossed the bay toward the railroad’s terminal in Jersey City, where commuters peeled off toward the ferries and Manhattan. Two EMD GP7 diesels pulled a short string of coaches, with locomotive 1532 in the lead and 1526 behind it, both running long-hood-forward in the classic CNJ style.
At the throttle was Lloyd Wilburn, sixty-three, of Red Bank, a career railroad man who wore an engineer’s cap or a Stetson and had crossed this bridge more times than anyone could count. Beside him sat fireman Peter Andrew, forty-two, a World War II veteran whose job was to take control if the engineer ever couldn’t. The conductor working the aisle behind them, John Francis Kelly, was punching tickets on this route for the very first time.
It was the first morning of Rosh Hashanah, so the crowd was thin for a Monday. The five cars could hold nearly four hundred people but carried closer to a hundred, and among them were Shore commuters, Wall Street men, an infant just four months old named Paul, an Army courier, a chemical-company director, and an investment banker carrying a fortune in negotiable bonds that divers would later fish from the wreckage.
One of the quiet men in the second car was George “Snuffy” Stirnweiss, the former New York Yankees second baseman who had won the American League batting title in 1945 and helped the club to three World Series championships before a heart attack pushed him out of the game and into a low-profile career in finance.
At about nine fifty-four, the bridge tender heard the horn of the dredge Sand Captain asking for the lift, and he telephoned Elizabethport to hold 3314 on the western shore. The southwest span rose.
Three signals stood between the waiting gap and any approaching train: a warning three-quarters of a mile out, another a quarter-mile out, and a hard red stop just five hundred feet from the open steel. Fifty feet past that last signal sat an automatic derailer, a brutal little wedge built to knock a slow train’s wheels off the rail so that ties and ballast would grind a runaway to a halt.
Train 3314 did none of the things it was supposed to do.
When investigators later raised the speed-recorder tape, they found the train had been running at roughly forty-two miles an hour where the span allowed something closer to twenty, more than double the safe speed. It rolled through the warning, rolled through the stop, hit the derailer, and kept moving, its wheels chewing along the ballast without ever slowing enough. The emergency brakes did not engage until the lead locomotive was within about seven feet of open air, which was far too late to matter.
Both diesels and the first two coaches dropped forty feet into Newark Bay and sank at once. Nearly everyone in the second car drowned before they understood anything was wrong.
Car 932 was caught by its rear truck and hung out over the water at close to eighty degrees while the people still inside clawed their way up the luggage racks toward the ropes and hands reaching down from the bridge. Two hours later, the last of its support gave way and it went in too, though the fourth and fifth cars stayed on the trestle and were spared.
The search for the dead took six days and drew in the Coast Guard, local police and firefighters, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, Civil Defense, and a line of local funeral directors. One young Coast Guard apprentice who worked the water that day went on to spend more than forty years in the service, through hurricanes and national disasters, and he would still call Newark Bay the worst thing he ever saw.
What the inquiries could never answer
The Interstate Commerce Commission, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, and the Army Corps of Engineers each opened a file, and each came to the same frustrating place. The brakes had worked. The signals had worked. The derailer had worked exactly as designed. The wreck was raised and picked over, and no mechanical fault could be found in any of it.
The engineer’s autopsy only deepened the puzzle. Wilburn’s heart showed signs of hypertensive disease, which fed the early theory that he had suffered a fatal attack at the controls, but the pathologist concluded that he had actually died of drowning, which meant he was still alive when the engine hit the water. And even if Wilburn had somehow been incapacitated on the approach, no one could explain why Andrew, sitting right beside him with a clear view of every signal, never reached over to stop the train.
The railroad had long argued that two men in the cab made a dead-man’s control unnecessary, since one could always take over for the other. New Jersey no longer accepted that logic. After Newark Bay, the Board of Public Utilities ordered dead-man’s devices installed on every passenger locomotive operating in the state, and that rule is one of the few solid, lasting things the wreck left behind. Everything else remains rumor: a heart flutter, a blackout, a moment of inattention on a span the crew had crossed a thousand times. The two men who could have explained it went down with the engine.
The tragedy reached farther than the water. Among the dead was James Carmalt Adams, brother-in-law of the writer Kurt Vonnegut. Two days after the crash, Vonnegut’s sister Alice died of cancer in a New Jersey hospital, having learned of her husband’s death only when a fellow patient handed her a newspaper the day before she died.
Vonnegut and his wife took in three of the four orphaned Adams boys; the youngest went to a cousin in Alabama. Years later Vonnegut folded the whole terrible week into his novel Slapstick — the same book on whose cover he finally dropped the “Jr.” from his name.
Car 932 and the man who could pay
Hudson County in 1958 still ran on the numbers. A player picked three digits, laid down anywhere from a few pennies to a few dollars at a candy store or a newsstand, and waited for a daily figure that no one could easily rig.
The odds of hitting were one in a thousand, and a hit paid out enormously. The racket was illegal, it was everywhere, and in Jersey City it belonged to a man who dressed as though he couldn’t afford the paper he had once sold on the street.
Joseph Vincent Moriarty was born in Jersey City in June 1910. He started running numbers around the age of thirteen and as a boy he had hawked newspapers in the bars and restaurants of his neighborhood. He lived with his sisters in a small brownstone in the Horseshoe, the old Irish pocket down by the waterfront, and he wore the same cheap suit until people who passed him on the street were tempted to offer him spare change.
The police told a different story about that same man. In their telling he ran a multimillion-dollar independent book, carried a gun, and stashed cash the way other men leave umbrellas behind, tucked into cars and garages he could walk away from without a second thought.
When the wire services and the local front pages ran the photograph of car 932 hanging off the lift, the digits on its flank were as clear as anything in print. People across the county played 9-3-2, and the next day the number came in.
Bookmakers from Newark to the West Side of Manhattan were buried under the payouts, and some of them simply vanished rather than settle but Newsboy paid.
Covering a hit that size is not generosity; it is a quiet announcement that your bank runs pretty deep. It is also exactly how a man gets noticed by people he would rather stay invisible to. The money he paid out is said to have drawn the attention of the Harlem mafioso Mike Coppola, along with the police who had been circling Moriarty for years.
Before long he was arrested on lottery-slip charges and sent to state prison.
In July 1962, with Moriarty locked up, two day laborers fixing up a broken-down garage at 47 Oxford Avenue in Jersey City pried open the trunk of an abandoned 1947 Plymouth registered to his girlfriend.
Inside they found about $2.6 million in cash, roughly $13,000 in stocks and bonds, and three handguns. Detectives soon hit a second garage nearby and turned up shopping bags stuffed with betting slips, adding machines, and still more money. The FBI and the Internal Revenue Service moved in fast, and Hudson County would later fight the federal government in court over who had the right to keep what the papers were already calling “Moriarty’s millions.”
For a week afterward, kids and old ladies all over the neighborhood took to peeking into other people’s garages, on the theory that if one Plymouth held a fortune, another one might too.
Moriarty first swore the money wasn’t his, then reversed himself and declared it on a tax form when an IRS agent explained he would be convicted either way and could at least get part of it back. He was released in 1965, arrested again, said to have been abducted in the early 1970s by people hunting for more of his hidden caches, and arrested again after that, running up forty-seven arrests by the end.
Around 1975, serving yet another sentence, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and Governor Brendan Byrne commuted the term. Moriarty died at Christ Hospital in Jersey City on February 26, 1979, at the age of sixty-eight. He never once played the part of the movie gangster. He simply outlasted almost everyone who ever bet against his bank.
What the bay kept, and what you can still walk
The two drowned locomotives were pulled from the water, shipped back to General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division, rebuilt, and returned to service. Locomotive 1532 kept its number and was photographed years later pulling passenger trains again, which is a haunting thought if you know what that number did. Its partner, 1526, came back renumbered as 1531. Both spent the rest of their working lives mostly hauling freight.
The bridge itself limped on toward its own slow ending. On a foggy morning in May 1966, the French freighter Washington struck one of the lift spans, knocking two tracks out of use for good, and by then the railroad no longer needed them. When the Aldene Plan took effect in the spring of 1967 and rerouted Shore trains into Newark Penn Station, the old crossing became a ghost line, served only by a Bayonne-to-Cranford shuttle called the “Scoot.” The last freight rumbled across in 1976, and the last passenger train pulled out of Bayonne’s Eighth Street Station on August 6, 1978. Once the Coast Guard declared the idle structure a hazard to shipping, demolition of the central lift spans began in July 1980, the long trestle and approaches came down in 1987 and 1988, and the piers were finally pulled from the water starting in 2012.
That is the strange awe of the place. An entire four-track highway of steel, once as ordinary to Shore commuters as the Parkway is to the rest of us, has vanished so thoroughly that a newcomer would never guess a train once flew off that alignment into the same bay. What’s left, if you know where to look, is a scatter of concrete stumps in the water and a right-of-way the city has been quietly repurposing ever since.
If you want to make a small pilgrimage of it, start on the Bayonne waterfront and face west. You are looking straight at the water that took forty-eight people, and there is no plaque out there big enough to mark it, which is its own kind of New Jersey memorial: we pave things over and keep moving.
From there, drive to Liberty State Park and walk into the beautifully restored Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal. That building was the far end of the world 3314 was aiming for, and if you stand in the great concourse you can picture the morning crowd that never arrived to fill it.
Over in Jersey City, the Horseshoe is not a museum but a living stretch of streets and stoops, and that is exactly the point. The biggest independent numbers bank on the Hudson lived like a man who sold newspapers for a living, and Oxford Avenue is still an ordinary block that once hid a fortune in the trunk of a car.
And if you ride NJ Transit’s North Jersey Coast Line today, you are riding the descendant of that Bay Head train, just not over that bridge and with a safeguard the wreck forced into being. Every clean, unremarkable stop your train makes is, in a sideways way, an answer to the few feet of track Lloyd Wilburn did not have.
September 15 comes around every year. The number on the hanging car was 932. The two men in the cab never got to explain themselves, the bookie in the cheap suit paid out in full, and the bay kept the rest.
