Mississauga Mishap b/w Come'th the Knight

Canadian Pacific train 54 was hauling 106 cars east through Mississauga late on Saturday, November 10, 1979. As it passed Burnhamthorpe Road an overheated axle bearing burned through. At the Mavis Road crossing the failing wheels tore loose and 24 cars piled up across the tracks. Propane tankers caught fire and exploded in a fireball visible from 100 kilometres away, and a section of one tanker came down about 675 metres off in an empty field. In the wreckage lay a ruptured car of liquid chlorine.

Brakeman Larry Krupa uncoupled cars and got them clear of the flames, keeping the fire from spreading down the train. Over the next day police and firefighters emptied most of the city. More than 200,000 people left their homes in one of the largest peacetime evacuations in North American history, and the last of them did not get back for nearly a week. Nobody died. The city came to call it the Mississauga Miracle, and Justice Samuel Grange's federal inquiry recommended roller bearings on rail cars and double shelf couplers on tank cars.

Roy Sluiter answered with 'Mississauga Mishap', a 4:22 original issued under the name Train Gang on a Newport Records 45. World Records manufactured it under number WRC3-1026, with the lacquer cut at The Lacquer Channel in Toronto. On the flip was another Sluiter song, 'Come’th The Knight'. Train Gang was Sluiter on vocals and guitar, Mike Greger on bass and Neil Haron on harmonica.

Sluiter had been writing songs for records for fifteen years by then. Around the end of 1964 he wrote 'Ouie Di Douie' for the Toronto teenage beat group Marrs Five, whose single on the tiny Amato label won a night on CHUM's nightly record battle and picked up airplay from Johnny Onn at CJME in Regina.

By the late 1970s he was working in Mississauga as a country songwriter, lounge proprietor and businessman, with a recording setup in his apartment. Local players drifted into his orbit: garage rockers, parody country acts, heavy psychedelic outfits. He booked them on his shows and recorded them for his own label, Ratz Records.

In 1980 that circle produced Mississauga "Live" (Ratz Records, LP-33002), with Sluiter as producer and engineer. The sleeve credits the recording to the Newport Hotel in Mississauga between July and November 1980. Knight, Decade, Atticraft and the Statics all turned up, Knight with 'Mississauga Cowboy'. Train Gang came back with four parts of 'Mississauga Mishap' spread across the album, and Sluiter closed it alone with Part V, playing and singing everything himself.

-Robert Williston