Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [3]
On Friday, August 8, Bryan and his wife boarded the train in Lincoln, Nebraska, as the heat wave settled over the Plains and Midwest. Across the country, temperatures in New York crept upward, toward the 90s, and as the train sped across the country toward its final destination, it was as if Bryan was bringing the heat with him.
INTRODUCTION: FIGHTING FOR AIR
BY AUGUST 1, all of New York was talking about the disaster. “HALF A HUNDRED DEAD,” screamed the front-page headline in the New York Times. “HOSPITALS ARE FILLED,” read another. “PITIFUL SCENES IN THE MORGUE.” At the latest count, forty-seven people had died, and of the seventy or so injured, many were expected to perish, victims of one of the most common, yet horrific, tragedies of late-nineteenth-century urban America: colliding trains.
The story was familiar. Two evenings before at 6:45 P.M., the West Jersey and Seashore excursion train had left Atlantic City, driven by engineer John Greiner with fireman Morris Newell stoking the engine. Only minutes later Greiner saw the Reading express train on a perpendicular track flying toward the same crossing he was approaching. Since his train had the white flag, which meant the Reading train had the “stop” signal, Greiner assumed he had a clear track ahead of him. But as the Reading train continued to thunder toward the crossing, Greiner shouted to his fireman, “My God, Morris, he’s not going to stop!” With a collision imminent, Greiner ran to the engine’s steps and prepared to jump. For a moment he stood on the steps and watched the ground rush by. Then, with a change of heart, he returned to his duties in the cab.
A second later the crash came. The Reading train struck Greiner’s excursion train in the middle of the second of its six coaches, killing over forty people instantly. The engine of the Reading express was smashed to pieces, and its engineer, Edward Farr, was killed on the spot. While most of the excursion train’s cars derailed, the engine continued untroubled along its track for several hundred feet, after it was severed from the rest of the train. Greiner jumped from his cab and ran back to the rest of the train. “When I got back to the scene of the accident,” he recounted, “the sight which met my eyes was appalling. Dead bodies were strewn about everywhere, and the cries of the dying and injured filled the air. It was a heartrending spectacle.”
Survivors later described to journalists the horror inside the train. Charles Seeds was sitting with his wife in the fourth car of Greiner’s train when the front part of his car “was smashed to kindling wood.” Seeds called to his wife to follow him, and jumped out the car’s window. He hurt his leg when he hit the ground, and as he looked around, he could not see his wife anywhere. When he jumped back up into the window, smoke filling the car blinded him. Through the gloom inside, Seeds saw a glittering object. He reached out and picked up his wife’s gold pocket watch, its chain broken by a piece of heavy timber that had just grazed her. Now finding his wife alive nearby, Seeds grabbed her by the hair and pulled her through the window to safety.
In the late-nineteenth century police did not use “Do Not Cross” tape, and within hours, thousands of spectators surrounded the wrecks. People continued to flock to the site for days. In Atlantic City, the usual greeting of “Are you going to the boardwalk?” gave way to “Are you going to the wreck today?” And as one newspaper affirmed, “Everyone went.” The dead were wrapped at the scene in blankets and sacks, then placed in another train car for return to the station, to be stored temporarily in the baggage room. Visiting the site, though popular, was traumatic.