Jasper County Democrat, Volume 4, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 June 1901 — HURLED TO ETERNITY [ARTICLE]

HURLED TO ETERNITY

FOURTEEN KILLED AND FIFTY HURT IN WABASH WRECK, Terrible Plunge of a Fast Traja Down an Embankment—Calvert Had Been Washed Out—Dead Are. Italian Immigrants—Horrible Ecene*. Train No. 3, the west-bound limited, one of the finest trains on the Wabash Railway, was wrecked at Cass, nine miles east of Peru, Ind., at 12:30 Wednesday morning by jumping the track and plunging down a forty-foot embankment. Fourteen bodies, all of Italian immigrants on She way to Colorado, were taken from the Wreck, and about fifty persons are injured. Train No. 3 is one of the oldest and one of the finest of the limited of the Wabash. From Peru west it is made up pf two sections—one from Detroit and the other from Toledo —and consists of ten caps. With combined baggage car and express, one combination, one day, one emigrant, three chair cars, three Bleepers and the private car of the general superintendent of the Iron Mountain system, William Cotton. The train was one hotir late and was making up lost time. While on a sharp curve, running fully sixty miles an hour, the engine Struck a weakened culvert, derailing itself, plunged down the embankment.'The express car and the first chair car telescoped themselves, while the emigrant car in the lead, and, followed by two chair cars, went down on the left side of the track. The «first sleeper of the train was badly crushed and twisted, Handing with its forward and hind trucks one on each end of the embankments. The sleeper following was twisted and the windows crushed in both ends. The trucks were torn from under the car, but no one in either sleeper was injured. Only the last sleeper and the private car of the Iron Mountain remained on the track uninjured. At the foot of the embankment, so steep that it could hardly be climbed, crushed and jumbled in a mass, with two chair cars on the top of the emigrant car, was where the deaths occurred. There was no warning, simply a concussion, a grinding sound, then a plunge to death below. |