CATASTROPHE: In a Maryland Fog

It was just 45 minutes to Washington. In the B. & O.’s eight-car Cleveland-Washington Night Express, roaring down the double-track right-of-way through the Maryland hills, the yawns and groans of awakening passengers floated down the aisles. Porters tugged at green Pullman curtains. In the diner there was the satisfying, early-morning smell of buttered toast and steaming coffee. The scrub pine and birch that swished by outside the windows were shrouded in a low-lying fog.

The train squealed to a stop. In the washrooms, men hurried to finish shaving while the train stood still. In the diner, breakfast assumed a more leisurely air. Passenger Milton Shapp, dressing his 17-month-old daughter, Dolores, in an upper berth, called down to his wife to find Dolores’ misplaced sock. No one knew what the stop was for; passengers never do.

As the cars jerked again to a lazy start, anyone who was listening close might have heard the always ominous, always pulse-quickening rumble of a distant train. He would have assumed it was on the other track, about to rush past with sudden whoosh! There was a train on the other track, but there was also one on the same rails as the Cleveland Express, roaring down from behind. Then, in one blinding, shattering moment, there was one crash followed by another.

The B. & O.’s Detroit-to-Washington Ambassador, its throttle wide open, drove into the rear of the Cleveland Express. The Ambassador’s diesel-powered engine hurtled to one side, both it and the Express’s last Pullman fell into the path of an oncoming fast freight. Steel ground against steel, gushing fuel oil caught fire, long steel pipes from the freight cars were thrown like match sticks over the shattered mass. All three trains tangled into a knot of wreckage. From beneath it came the screams of the trapped, the gasps of the dying. A Brazilian steelman, hopelessly pinned under the hot mass, talked for two hours with a priest before he died. The dead were counted at 20, but after three days not all the bodies, were identified.

There was no immediate explanation. The Cleveland Express had stopped to repair a faulty air pump; its flagman, J. M. Gilhart, had walked down the track to warn any approaching train. He was supposed to have fastened torpedoes to the rails to warn the train that followed. Perhaps he failed to do so, perhaps they did not go off, perhaps they were not heard. Gilhart was called back when the pump was repaired. He was killed with the passengers in the rear Pullman. The engineer of the Ambassador, saved by the steel strength of his engine, said he did not see a red signal because of fog and smoke from the approaching freight train. It was the worst wreck on the B. & 0. since 1907, when 100 were killed in a West Virginia crash.