Jasper County Democrat, Volume 6, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 January 1904 — WRECK KILLS A SCORE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

WRECK KILLS A SCORE

CALIFORNIA EXPREBB 18 DEMOLISHED IN KAN6AB. Collide# with * Cattle Tmln-Nane Keen pe from Crash Without Injury— Passe age re Are Crashed by the Tele* •coping of the Cere. The Rock Island. California and Mexico express, which left Chicago on Monday night for the west, was wrecked shortly after 1 o’clock Wednesday morning at Willard, Kau., fourteen miles west of Topeka, In a head-on collision with a cattle train. The whole-train was demolished. Twenty persons were killed and •very persou on the train was injured. Many persons from Oklahoma who had taken advantage of the homesteaders’ excursion rates were on the train. It also contained through sleepers and chair cars fqr San Francisco and Los Angeles. The wreck was one of the worst that has happened on the Rock Island system in years.

Occurring as it did nt a small station with a few facilities for aid and in the darkness, there was much delay in removing the dead and injured and In caring for the survivors. The train was composed of a combination baggage nnd mail car, a regular baggage car, a smoker, a tourist sleeper and a standard sleeper. Two cars filled with passengers were demolished, both locomotives were de-

atroyed and four carloads of stock were torn to pieces and dozen of the dead animals were strewn over the right Of way. It was in the third car of the passenger train, the first conch having been preceded by a smoker and baggage car, that the greatest loss of life occurred. The first warning given the passengers In this car was when the sudden setting of the air brake shut off the lights, leaving all in darkness. So terrific was the force of the collision that every coach on the heavy passenger train except the last two Pullman cars was piled in a great heap of wreckage. The passenger coaches were telescoped by the heavily laden freight cars. The crash case shortly after midnight when practically every soul in the conches of the doomed train was asleep. Those who escaped clambered out and, not stopping to bind up their bruises, turned every effort to prevent the wreckage from eatching fire, the flames already having seized on the ruins of a uumber of the freight cars. Above the shrieking steam of the battered engines could be heard the screams find groans of the dying and injured. Not even donning their clothes and braving the cold with only overcoats to shield them from the cutting winds men and women from the two sleeping cars which escaped the ruin, began the work of rescue. Body after body was taken from the wreckage, horribly mangled and, in many cases, the features so crushed that they were not recognizable. Most of those in the forward end of the car following the smoker were killed instantly. Thirty in the rear end of the coach, however, succeeded in escaping from that end of the car, which was still unobstructed. No one from the front half of the car escaped. They were crushed down between the seats by the smoker. When rescue was finally possible only three living persons were taken out by the rescuers, who were compelledchop holes in the side and through tjie floor and top of the coach to -reach them.

CHICAGO CAR BARN BANDITS ON TRIAL.