On 16 June 1837, at a little after six o'clock in the morning, a train of cars carrying lumber and gravel and crowded with twenty or more Irish track laborers and other workmen left the Boston depot of the Boston & Worcester Railroad Corporation bound for Worcester, Massachusetts. About four miles out, just after the train had passed the City Mills and was nearing the Brookline Road, a wheel on one of the cars broke. The train was thrown from the tracks. Two men were killed and several others severely injured.

Among the injured was a man named Gilham Barnes, engaged by the corporation about two weeks before to carry out maintenance work on several bridges between Boston and Worcester. The previous day Barnes, his brother Luther, and one of the men that worked with them had ridden the same train (an unscheduled track maintenance train known to the corporation as the “gravel” train) as far as the Arsenal Bridge, which carried the railroad over the Watertown Road in Brighton to deliver materials and tools. On the morning of the sixteenth, Barnes sent the others by wagon via the Mill Dam toll road to begin work on the Arsenal Bridge while he made arrangements with the conductor of the gravel train for additional materials to be carried to the Worcester Bridge.