In the late-nineteenth century police did not use “Do Not Cross” tape, and within hours, thousands of spectators surrounded the wrecks.

From Hot Time in the Old Town The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt by Edward P. Kohn.  Many times through this story, it is brought home how much more brutally dangerous past times (1896) were and yet which dangers were treated almost as routine.  A long forgotten train accident:

“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. Benjamin Maull, a veteran of the Civil War, said seeing the wreck affected him more than any scene of carnage he had witnessed during his four years of service. 

 

Less than two days later, speculation was rife among newspapers that Farr, the driver of the Reading train that ran the signal, had a friend in his cab at the time of the accident. “That raises the suspicion that he may have been more occupied in conversation than in watching signals,” the editors of the New York Tribune noted.

The paper also sought to comment on the tragedy of the accident’s many victims. Men who died on the battlefield, the paper believed, earned a measure of glory in the process. “Tornadoes and earthquakes and fire and flood kill thousands, but man bows submissive to the resistless elements. There is “even something grand in being a victim of Nature. But to meet death from the blind fury of a Frankenstein, to suffer and be crushed by the misbehavior of one’s own creations, to go out for pleasure trusting in the perfection of civilization and have that civilization turn and rend one, is to fall without any compensation.” Industrial and technological developments such as trains—the “perfection of civilization”—had conquered the vast distances of the nation, but at a price. In the modern era people faced new and horrible agents of death.