Around 5:00 pm. on Tuesday, February 6, 1951,
Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) Train #733, nicknamed
The Broker, left
Exchange Place in
Jersey City. An express train to
Bay Head via the
North Jersey Coast Line, No. 733 was crowded that day due to a
labor strike on the nearby
Jersey Central Railroad. It carried over 1,000 passengers in eleven cars drawn by
PRR K4s 4-6-2 steam locomotive #2445. That afternoon, rail traffic through Woodbridge was being diverted onto a temporary wooden trestle and a
shoofly near Fulton Street, allowing laborers building the
New Jersey Turnpike to work on the main line. A notice had gone out to train engineers in late January after 1:01 pm. on February 6, they were to proceed through Woodbridge not at the normal but at . However, the PRR at the time did not require any
signal to be in place to warn approaching trains about the diversion, believing the verbal notification to be sufficient. Although Fitzsimmons initially claimed that he had been traveling at only , the inquiry estimated that
The Brokers speed was between . Fitzsimmons also stated that he was looking for trackside signals that would have warned him to slow down, but the line between the
station and the temporary trestle lacked any. The report concluded that the wreck was caused by "excessive speed on a curve of a temporary track." Fitzsimmons continued working for the PRR until 1953, but never operated a train again. He died in 1976 at age 83, 25 years after the wreck. == In popular culture ==