Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 35, Number 148, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 January 1904 — TWENTY KILLED IN WRECK. [ARTICLE]

TWENTY KILLED IN WRECK.

Head -On Collision Demolishes Express Train in Kansas. The California and Mexico express train, which left Chicago on Monday night for the west, was wrecked shortly after 1 o’clock Wednesday morning at Willard, Kan., fourteen miles west of Topeka, in a head-on collision with a cattle train. The whole train was demolished. Twenty persons were tilled and every person 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 for San Francisco and Los Angeles. Occurring aS it’did at 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 earing for the survivors. "The train was composed of a combination baggage nnd mail car, n regular baggage car, a smoker, a tourist sleeper and a standard sleepbr. Two cars filled with passengers were demolished, both locomotives were destroyed 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 find warning given the passengers in this car was when the sudden setting of tlie air brake shut off the lights, leaving all in darkness. So terrific was the force of the collision Hint every conch on the heavy passenger train except the last two Pullman ertrs was piled-in n great Irenp of wreckage. The passenger coaches were telescoped by the heavily laden freight cars. A Waiters' -Union, a branch of the Hotel and Restaurant Employes' International Alliance and Bartenders' League, was organized at Toronto, Can.. Recently.