RUMANIA: Orient Wrecked

Nearly every U. S. citizen knows the name of the super-famed crack express train which plys between New York and Chicago. Similarly every smart European knows the Orient Express, famed Paris-to-Bucharest flyer. Last week this train de luxe sped Parisward from Bucharest, Rumania with shrieking whistle, tolling bell, toward Death.

Rumanian railways are mostly single-track. As the Orient approached the tiny station of Recea so did a local express train. Head on they crashed, directly in front of the station. One reeling locomotive toppled to right, the other to left. Thirty passengers and both engineers were instantly killed. Among the wounded was the Wahl Eversharp Pencil Co.’s foreign sales manager, Mr. Alexander Herschler of Rochester, N. Y.

The wretched Recea switchman, who should have sidetracked the local-express to let the Orient pass, promptly took to the woods. So did the rest of the Recea station crew, after locking up their station. Seemingly they thought that when the hand of the Rumanian Justice fell it would be merciless, perhaps indiscriminate.

A party of Rumanian cadets had been on the local-express. They burst in the station door. One, a telegraphist, seized the Morse key, clicked frantic appeals for help. Within half an hour a wrecking train had steamed up. Meanwhile cadets worked mightily to extract wounded passengers from crumpled wooden cars, some of which had begun to burn.

By the time the wrecking crew arrived, cadets and passengers had helped themselves so successfully that it remained only to rush the more severely wounded to Bucharest and tidy up the track. Pencil Man Herschler was taken safely to the hospital.

Through woods and peasant villages police prowled, caught nobody.

Abysmally ignorant U. S. news organs told that the train wrecked was the Simplon-Orient Express. The distinction, nice, between the Orient and the Simplon-Orient is that although both run Balkan-ward from Paris through the Swiss Simplon Tunnel, the Orient later branches off to Bucharest, and the Simplon-Orient to Constantinople.