Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 39, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 January 1907 — MORE THAN 35 DEAD. [ARTICLE]

MORE THAN 35 DEAD.

Forty Hurt In Indiana Accident Due to Explosion of Powder. Nearly forty lives were lost in a Big Four wreck at Sandford, Ind., Saturday night The cause of the disaster has not been fully explained, as several theories are advanced. The result was terrible. The shock was felt for thirty miles, many believing it an earthquake. The three coaches of the passenger train were filled. The entire train, including the locomotive, was blown from the track. The coaches were demolished. the engine was hurled fifty feet and the passengers either blown to pices, consumed by fire or rescued in a more or less injured condition. At least thir-ty-five injured, some fatally, are at the hospitals id Terre Haute and Paris, 111. Several are also being cared for at Sandford. According to trainmen of the freight, the explosion of the powder was caused by the concussion made by the passing passenger train, which was slowing down for the station at Sandford. Another theory is that gas escaping from an oil pipe line near by entered the car containing the powder and a spark from the passing engine ignited the gas.

More than two score of lives were sacrificed and three scores of persons received serious injuries in railroad wrecks in the United States the same day. Weather conditions, combined with the frailties of employes and defects in construction of roadbed and machinery, caused a dozen different wrecks in widely separated parts of the country, half of which resulted In fatalities. Fire, incident to the use of steam engines in connection with wooden cars, added to the horrors of a wreck caused by fog hiding a stop signal on the Big Four road at Fowler, Ind., in which villagers who rushed to the rescue were driven away by the flames, and stood helplessly by while the victims of the disaster were slowly roasted to death. Scarcely less full of horror was a wreck on the same railroad near Terre Haute, Ind., caused by a car of powder on a siding exploding and blowing to pieces a passenger train on the main track. Passengers and members of the train crew there met death or injury without warning. . , AU Desoto, Kan., a defective engiqe boiler blew up, hurling the fireman and engineer to death, and in Minnesota a fast train was ditched because of defects. in the track. Confusion of orders or heedless of signals caused disastrous collisions at Minonk, Ill.; Denmark, S. C.; Meridian, Miss., and Troupe. Texas, -while a washout was responsible for a wreck in Michigan, and one near Peoria.