Great Train Wreck of 1918

We’re coming up on the 100th anniversary of one of the worst train wrecks in United States history. More than 100 people died. And even though it’s usually noted as the worst train wreck in American history, it was kind of a run-of-the-mill accident for the time. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey listeners, we have got some live shows coming up. Sunday,
July at two pm, we will be doing a live
podcast at Adams National Historical Park in Quincy, Massachusetts. The
show will be outdoors on the bil Estate Lawn at
one one Adam Street in Quincy. Then on Saturday, July
twenty one, we'll be doing a live podcast at Convention

(00:20):
Days at Women's Rights National Historical Park and Seneca Falls,
New York. That show will be at four pm and
Wesleyan Chapple and We also have East Coast and West
Coast tours coming up in August and October, with stops
in Atlanta, Georgia, Raleigh, North Carolina, Somerville, Massachusetts, Brooklyn, New York, Washington,
d C, Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles and

(00:43):
San Francisco, California. You can find more information about all
of these shows and links to my tickets at missed
in History dot com slash Tour. Welcome to steph you
Missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,

(01:05):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying. We are coming up on the anniversary
of one of the worst train wrecks in United States history,
if not the worst train wreck in US history. Sometimes
you will see it listed as the worst train wreck ever.
That is wrong, That is definitely not true. It really

(01:25):
pales in comparison to some of the world's deadliest recks. So,
for example, in nineteen seventeen, there was a train carrying
French soldiers that derailed in France and then caught fire
and more than six hundred people died. Trains are a
lot safer now than they were a hundred years ago,
but we still will have train incidents with huge fatality
numbers a lot of times. There are things that happened

(01:47):
during natural disasters. So a train in Sri Lanka was
hit by the two thousand four Indian Ocean tsunami and
that killed more than a thousand people. So by comparison,
the Great train Wreck of nineteen eighteen was a lot
smaller than any of that. More than a hundred people died,
that was a lot for the time. Uh. And even

(02:07):
though it's usually noted as the worst train wreck in
American history, it was also kind of a run of
the mill accident. So the death toll was large, but
the circumstances that led to the accident were typical. So
we're going to start out today with a look at
why the railroad industry was so dangerous at that time

(02:28):
before we get into the actual wreck. So, as Tracy
just indicated, in the early days of the railroad industry
in the United States, trains were extremely dangerous. There were
no standards for reporting injuries and deaths, so the numbers
about exactly how dangerous are a little bit scattered, but
in general, hundreds of people died and thousands were injured

(02:51):
in connection to the railroad every single year between eighteen
eighty two and eighteen ninety two. The year with the
fewest deaths was eight five, during which three hundred seven
people were killed. Was the worst. Eight hundred six deaths
happened that year, and passengers and workers alike died in

(03:11):
things like collisions, derailments, bridge collapses, and boiler explosions. It
was particularly dangerous for the workers, with one of the
most common sources of injury being the process of coupling
and decoupling train cars. The cars were connected using these
link and pin couplers, and you had to physically get

(03:31):
in between two train cars to connect them or deconnect
them from each other. Forty four percent of on the
job injuries for rail railroad workers during this time happened
during coupling and decoupling cars. The industry was so dangerous
that manufacturers of wheelchairs, crutches, and prosthetic limbs advertised specifically

(03:55):
to railroad workers, and railway surgeon became its own profession,
with its own professional organizations and its own medical journals.
Railway surgeons were usually general practitioners who also performed surgeries
and amputations, and as the industry grew, they provided both
routine and emergency care to railway workers as well as

(04:16):
to passengers who became ill or were injured. So at
first the railroad started employing doctors because the crews that
were building new railroad lines were way out in remote,
inaccessible territory, so the railroad needed to have its own
medical staff on hand, rather than expecting there to be
a doctor anywhere nearby to come help in an emergency.

(04:37):
But over time this blossomed into an entire medical system,
sometimes funded by the railroads and sometimes funded by the
railroads employees. By the time of the Great Train Wreck
of nineteen eighteen, nearly every railroad in the United States
had its own medical organization, and while routine care was
part of the job, they were also approaching it as

(04:58):
though they were going to be tree eating injuries among
both workers and passengers, and that these injuries are basically inevitable. Unsurprisingly,
in the face of such dramatic and obvious dangers to
both passengers and workers, there were huge calls for safety legislation.
As a general rule, the railroad companies opposed this legislation,

(05:19):
while the emerging railroad labor unions supported it. So the
railroad companies were in many cases paying for medical staff
to treat injuries while opposing the legislation to require safety
measures that would have helped prevent them. It took a
long time to pass the laws that people were asking for.
Public demand for some kind of safety legislation started as

(05:42):
early as eighteen seventy, but the first major piece of
legislation came more than twenty years later with the Safety
Appliance Act of that was passed over the ongoing objections
of the railroad companies. This Act required better powered braking systems,
so before the brakes were very rudimentary they were manual.

(06:05):
You basically had to have a brakeman on each car,
applying these brakes manually to get the train to stop.
So this was requiring powered brakes, and they had to
be installed on enough of the train cars for the
engineer to stop the train from the engine without having
to have individual brakeman controlling a lot of manual brakes
on each car. The Safety Appliance Act of eighteen nine

(06:27):
three also required automatic couplers that could be operated without
a worker having to get physically in between two train
cars to do it. The Safety Appliance Act of eighteen
ninety three went into effect in nineteen hundred, and it
was amended in nineteen o three to clarify various issues
that arose once railroads were attempting to comply with it.

(06:49):
Another act in nineteen ten added more safety requirements and
empowered the Interstate Commerce Commission to establish standards for safety systems.
A nineteen o seven laws sent maximums on working hours
for railroad employees on the grounds that exhausted workers were
more likely to make fatal mistakes. So these laws and

(07:09):
the safety standards that they required definitely made the railroads
a lot safer on the job. Injuries for railroad workers
dropped precipitously, even as the number of workers in the
industry was growing. Passenger deaths dropped as well. These improved
breaking systems meant that when trains collided, they usually did
so at slower speeds than they did before, so the

(07:32):
rex were not as deadly, but the trains still collided.
The number of train wrecks per year continued to increase
after all these laws were passed, in part because of
an increasing number of trains on the rails. The number
of annual rex peaked in seven, with thirty nine recks
in the United States that year alone. It was about

(07:53):
that time that professional publications in the industry started talking
about some kind of automatic signaling and train control systems
which could help prevent collisions rather than just slowing down
the trains before they ultimately hit each other. Those are
some systems already existed, but they weren't mandatory until after
the wreck that we're talking about today. The call for

(08:14):
it came before the wreck. Congress directed the Interstate Commerce
Commission to start investigating block signaling systems and automatic train
control systems in n seven, and that investigation was the
first step in requiring these types of systems. In a
block signaling system, train tracks are divided up into sections

(08:34):
called blocks, and the signals let the engineer know whether
the block ahead is clearer or not. Before the development
of automatic block signaling, keeping these signals up to date
could be really imprecise, as in a worker with a
stopwatch would clock the train when it passed and then
mark the block is clear when it should have been clear.

(08:55):
But once the train was out of a worker's line
of sight, that was all guesswork, with no way to
really know if the train had to stop for some reason.
The telegraph helped with this because train orders could be
sent up and down the line rather than basically by
estimating and hoping that everything was going as planned, but
this was still prone to all kinds of problems. Sometimes

(09:16):
there wasn't even an employee with a stop watch. There
was just a timetable of when the blacks are supposed
to be clear, and you would just sort of hope
that everything was on schedule that day. Automatic train control
systems are just what they sound like, their systems that
can automatically adjust the speed of the train, although at
the time sometimes they were used in a broader sense
to mean all kinds of different automatic safety systems, including signaling.

(09:39):
Although the i c C was investigating these systems in
nineteen o seven, formal orders to install them didn't begin
until the nineteen twenties and thirties, and these systems almost
certainly would have prevented the Great train Wreck of nineteen eighteen,
which we were going to get into after we first
paused for a sponsor break. The Great train Wreck of

(10:05):
nineteen eighteen was a head on collision between two trains
from the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway, also known
as the n C and St L for the Dixie Line.
The two trains involved were the Number one Express from
Memphis and the Number four from Nashville. The collision happened
about five miles or eight kilometers away from the main

(10:25):
Nashville train station, between Harding and a round house that
was known as Shops. The Number one Express from Memphis
was being pulled by locomotive number two eighty one. Behind
the locomotive was a baggage car, followed by five wooden
passenger coaches. Following those were two pullman sleepers, one made
completely of steel and the other with a steel undercarriage.

(10:47):
And ends on the Number four. From Nashville, there was
locomotive to eighty two, followed by a combination baggage and
mail car, and then another baggage car and six coaches.
All of the Number four's cars were wooden. Both trains
were segregated, and the front passenger cars were the gym
crow cars. This was the worst place to be on

(11:09):
the train. It was the closest to the engine, which
had its own dangers from the boiler to the likelihood
of an accident. It was the smokiest place on the
train because of smoke from the engine. So that is
how the lay out of the train was. On the
Number one from Memphis, a lot of the black passengers aboard.
We're going to work at a new depot munitions plant

(11:31):
in Old Hickory, which is part of Metro Nashville today.
The Number one had left Memphis around midnight on July nine.
Normally it arrived in Nashville at about seven ten in
the morning, and the Number four normally left Nashville at
seven am. Under normal circumstances, the two trains passed by
each other in opposite directions on a stretch of double

(11:53):
track between Nashville and shops. This was about two and
a half miles that's roughly four kilometers a a from
the station at Nashville. Any time that there was a delay,
the number four would wait at shops until the number
one train had passed. The railroad had a set of
standard procedures about which train on the tracks had the
right of way, and when it came to approaching Nashville

(12:16):
from the west, the inbound trains had priority. On this
particular morning, though both trains were running late. The Number
one from Memphis was about half an hour behind schedule
and the Number four, headed out of Nashville was about
seven minutes late. Before it left Nashville, the number four
received an order to meet the number seven running under

(12:36):
Engine to fifteen at Harding. The order also noted that
the number one train was being pulled by Engine to
eighty one, and this was all to help the crew
aboard the number four correctly identify the number one. So
after getting these orders, the conductor on the number four
had a conversation with the engineer about it, and he said,
the number one must be some late this morning, but

(12:58):
I don't believe the mail is going to delay us,
so he will have to change that meeting point to
Vaughan's Gap. Bonds Gap was the next stop west after Hardings.
It was basically saying, we're gonna have to meet that
number seven at a different point. According to the conductor
who survived this wreck and was interviewed later, he and
the engineer, David C. Kennedy had a conversation that left

(13:19):
him under the impression that they would be delayed on
that stretch of double track for a while as they
waited for the number one to pass them. But when
the number four got to that stretch of double tracks
by Shops, a different train was headed in the other direction.
It was a switch engine, or an engine that was
used to move cars from one place to another for

(13:40):
logistical reasons, rather than hauling passengers or cargo. Switch engines
at the time were usually smaller than the ones that
hauled passenger and freight trains. When the switch engine passed
by the number four, the conductor was collecting passengers tickets.
He heard this other train and he assumed what he
was hearing was the number one, but he did personally

(14:00):
go look and check which train. It was. A switch
engine passed by Shops at about seven fifteen in the morning,
at which point the number four continued onto that single
track and started picking up speed, and that's when people
in the operating tower at Shops realized that something was wrong.
The tower operator had been on duty for less than

(14:20):
ten minutes that day, and no one had mentioned to
him that the number one was behind schedule and hadn't
arrived yet when he got there. He only realized it
after the number four had already passed the tower, and
then he noticed that the number one wasn't listed on
his train sheet. The operator contacted the dispatcher and told
him that the number four train had moved on to

(14:42):
the signal the single track, but that he didn't think
the number one had arrived yet. The dispatcher told him
to try to stop that train, so the crew at
Shops dropped the signal to stop and they started sounding
the emergency whistle to try to get the attention of
somebody on the Number four. This didn't take long. The
number four was only about a train length away from

(15:02):
the tower, but its crew either did not hear the
whistle or didn't heat it, and the train continued to
pick up speed. At this point, both trains were approaching
a stretch of track called Dutchman's curve. It's a sharp
curve in the track which is also on a grade,
and an overhead highway bridge and a stretch of forest
also blocked the view of the other side of the curve,

(15:25):
so even though the weather was clear, it was impossible
for the cruise on either of the two trains to
see each other until it was too late for them
to stop or even really slow down. The two trains
collided head on at seven twenty in the morning. Both
trains were traveling at an estimated speed of fifty miles
or eighty kilometers per hour. The conductor on the Number

(15:47):
four said he felt the air brakes being applied on
his train before the collision, but the conductor on the
number one said he did not. The engineers and stokers
of both trains were killed instantly, so we have no
detail about what was happening in either locomotive in the
moments before the impact. These two locomotives propelled each other
upward in an inverted v before they fell down into

(16:10):
the corn fields on either side of the track, with
the Number one's locomotive falling on the west side and
the Number four is falling on the east. Both locomotives
were virtually demolished, with their frames and their machinery being
stripped completely free of the boilers and destroyed. Here's how
the i c C Report described the Number one Trains

(16:30):
cars after the wreck quote the baggage car was completely demolished.
The first coach lay crosswise the track, the combination car
of train number four being driven into its side near
the center and its rear end torn completely out to
a depth of twelve or fifteen feet. The second coach
was derailed and its forward end went down the bank

(16:52):
and rested on the front end of the boiler of
locomotive to eighty one, and its rear end rested on
the roadbed on top of the frame and are parts
of Locomotive to eighty one, its forward end being badly
broken and damaged. The third coach remained on the roadbed
with its forward end jammed against the rear of the
second coach. The rear trucks of this car and the

(17:13):
four following cars were not derailed. And here's how the
report described the Number four's cars. The forward half of
the combination car was demolished by coming in contact with
the first coach of train number one. The baggage car
was completely telescoped with the first coach to its rear,
both cars remaining upright, but we're practically destroyed as shown

(17:35):
by figure four. The end of the second coach was
demolished for a distance of six or eight feet and
partially telescoped with the rear end of the coach ahead
of it. The three rear cars of train number four
were not derailed and only slightly damaged. According to news
reports at the time, one people were killed and fifty

(17:56):
seven were injured. The death toll cited to Day comes
from the i c C Report, which was one hundred
and one killed and one hundred seventy one injured, but
it's likely that some of the injured died after their
injuries after that report was completed. It's not totally clear
how this broke down between employees and passengers. The i

(18:17):
c C Report lists both the injuries and the deaths
as eight seven passengers and fourteen employees. As we mentioned earlier,
the cars in the front of both trains were the
gym crow cars, so most of the passengers and the
cars that were completely crushed during the wreck were black
Between eight and of all the people killed in this

(18:38):
wreck were black. And we're going to talk about the
aftermath of this wreck after we first paused for a
little sponsor break. Conditions at the scene of the train
wreck were gruesome. Even though one car did catch fire,
the first people who arrived on the scene to assist

(19:00):
were able to put that fire out, but the front
cars on both trains had been crushed completely in the wreck,
and a lot of the bodies were too damaged to
be identified. And the cars were so gory that butchers
were asked to come from Nashville to help assist with
the cleanup effort, under the idea that they were used
to that much gore. Black and white doctors and nurses

(19:21):
came from Nashville to render aid. The National Chapter of
the Red Cross was on scene as well, and several
prominent women from the National area came with typewriters so
that survivors could dictate letters home to let their families
know that they were safe. The impact was also audible
for several miles, and in addition to the rescue workers
and other people who came to the scene to help,

(19:43):
a lot of people just came to gawk. There are
reports of between forty thousand and fifty thousand people coming
to the scene, but since there were only about a
hundred and twenty thousand people living in all of Nashville
at this time, that seems like maybe a little bit
of a stretch. There was also a children's home not
far from the scene of the wreck, and it's not
clear whether the children saw the wreck itself, but they

(20:04):
definitely saw its aftermath. Also, while there were definitely souvenir
hunters who took pieces of this wreck away, people's valuables
and luggage appear to have been left alone. Wrecking crews
arrived shortly after the accident to remove the wreckage and
clear the tracks so that train service could resume. Injured
people of both races were taken to City Hospital and

(20:25):
Vanderbilt Hospital, while the dead were transported to black and
white mortuaries in Nashville. The Black mortuaries in particular, were
overwhelmed by this huge volume of bodies that was brought in.
The Interstate Commerce Commission started an investigation almost immediately after
the wreck. The i c C had been established in
eighteen eighty seven to act as an independent regulatory body,

(20:48):
and it had been empowered to investigate train accidents in
nineteen ten. By today's standards, this investigation was really rudimentary.
They interviewed several people who worked for the railroad, and
they produced a seven page report with about five pages
of pictures that was dated August six, nineteen eighteen, a
little more than a month after the wreck happened. The

(21:10):
i c C conclusion was that the accident was caused
by the number four train being on the track at
Dutchman's Curve when it wasn't supposed to be. The number
one train had precedence and the number four was supposed
to wait at shops until the number one had passed,
but since engineer Kennedy was killed instantly, it's really unclear
why they didn't wait. This is especially true since multiple

(21:31):
people who were interviewed by the i c C said
that they knew this engineer to be a careful man
who adhered strictly to the rules. This definitely was not
a case of inexperience. The primary crews of both trains
had years of experience, and the only person on either
crew who was new to the job was the flagman
on the number four train. It also wasn't a case

(21:54):
of fatigue, or at least not fatigue caused by overly
long shifts. The number four trains who had been on
duty for less than an hour when this wreck took place.
So there's some speculation about what happened. That maybe engineer
Kennedy mistook that switch train for the number one, maybe
he just overlooked a signal somewhere, or maybe he thought
that because the number one was running so late, he

(22:17):
could make it all the way to Harding before the
number one did That last one seems kind of unlikely,
given that multiple people said that he was a man
who drove the train by the rules, because the rule
was to wait for the number one at shops, not
to try to beat it to a completely different stop. Yeah,
that seems like it would be a wild departure from
his normal behavior. One of the problems that the i

(22:38):
SEC did find was this the rules on precedence were clear,
and the rule was that the number four trains should
have waited for the number one at Shops, but there
wasn't really a good way of passing information related to
the train status. Although the operators in the tower at
Shops had a train list, there was not a formal

(22:58):
registry of the trains coming and goings. Instead, the crews
were in the habit of just asking the operator whether
the other trains had come in or not. The operator's
duties included running the tracks, which is to control which
train was on which track, so as a general rule,
the operator would probably have a sense of which trains
had come in and which ones had not, but that

(23:20):
was also not his actual job. It was the dispatcher's
job to know specifically which train had come and which hadn't.
So the i SEC recommended implementing a procedure in which
the trains would only proceed if they had confirmed with
the dispatcher that the train that had precedents had already arrived,

(23:41):
or that the train would only proceed if it had
an official order to do so, and the i c
C also recommended the sort of block system that we
talked about at the top of the show. In the
words of the report quote, with this volume of traffic,
and in view of the universally recognized features of increased
safety afforded by the block system, there can be no

(24:01):
valid excuse for the failure or neglect on the part
of the railroad company to utilize existing facilities for the
purpose of operating a block system on that line. The
I s C Report also noted that there would have
been much less loss of life if all the cars
on the trains had been steel instead of wood, and

(24:22):
recommended that the passenger trains phase out their wooden cars,
and that ultimately did happen. This wreck was very briefly
national news, but because this was also in the middle
of World War One, it was quickly overshadowed by wartime news,
and the fact that so many of the victims were
black meant that after the initial reporting, it just didn't

(24:43):
get as much attention in the white press. Today, there's
a historical marker near the side of the crash, which
was placed in two thousand and eight for the ninetie anniversary,
and it's also the subject of several ballads and songs.
I did not realize how colossally dangerous trains were in
their earth. I mean, there's the obvious amount of danger,

(25:05):
but I didn't realize it went quite to that extent
until I looked at all those numbers. Do you also
have some listener mail that maybe involved less loss of life?
It doesn't, actually, Uh, it is about our episode about
Hurricane San Serriaco. Um, so it's there's also loss of

(25:26):
life and listener mail today, not specifically, but uh, this
is from rosadel and she says that she's a librarian
in Puerto Rico, which was great. We got several emails
so far from people from Puerto Rico talking about their experiences.
So Rosedale says, I've been listening to your stuff you
miss in history class for years, and it was a
huge surprise when I saw you worked on an episode

(25:48):
about Hurricane San Serriaco. You mentioned several times that there
were a lot of parallels between San Sorriaco in and
Maria in, but I was not expecting them to be
so eerily so Miller, I lived through Maria. It was
one of the most horrifying experiences of my life. There
was a shock to listen that way. Too many things
I lived through last year and certainly still currently live

(26:09):
were repeats from in our history classes. We weren't taught
on what happened after the US invasion and how precarious
the situation was before San Syriaco struck Puerto Rico, much
like what happened with Maria. Just to mention a few parallels. Currently,
we are dealing with a massive financial crisis that has
led into buildings not receiving their usual upkeep, a decline

(26:32):
in our economy, and brutal austerity measures. The slowness in
the federal government's response, and the racial assumptions to try
to help beliefs as possible happened in Maria as well.
Migration to other areas of the United States also happened,
except that Maria's aftermath resulted in a mass migration to
states such as Florida, Texas, and the northeast of the

(26:52):
United States. I felt that I lived almost every single
point discussed in the episode, but with Hurricane Maria at
the end of the episode, I was in ray that
essentially the story repeated itself almost a hundred and nineteen
years later, and we had truly miss it in history class.
On another note, thank you so much for discussing the
political events in Puerto Rico in the decade of the
eighteen nineties, something else we missed in our classes. The

(27:14):
background on the island was very complicated, and it's one
that has not understood well up to the state particularly.
I was delighted when you use the word invasion to
describe the events of mar when, as some folks say
around here, quote the Americans came to the island. Not
a lot of people around here like that word, but
that essentially was what happened. Fun fact, July is now

(27:35):
a date to commemorate the establishment of the Puerto Rico
Commonwealth on July two, and there are few mentions on
what happened in except maybe in small circles and also
on social media. So the email goes on to say,
like I mentioned before, I felt enraged by the end
of the episode, but it truly has become one of
my favorite episodes ever. I hope this episode raises awareness

(27:57):
on Puerto Rico's history and complicated background and opens the
door to deeper discussions about the island's past, present, and future.
I truly appreciate all of your work on the podcast
and keep up the amazing job, Grassies. Tons of love
from Puerto Rico. Thank you so much for this email.
I had a lot of those parallels in the original
episode outline, and it was becoming this like many many, many,

(28:20):
many minutes long digression, and so I ultimately remove them
from that line, and I was very glad to get
them in the email so I could read them now.
So thank you so much for sending that along, and
for listening to the show, and to the other folks
who have written to us from from Puerto Rico, because
there have been several If you would like to write

(28:40):
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(29:02):
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