Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 September 1907 — MANY DIE IN WRECK. [ARTICLE]

MANY DIE IN WRECK.

TRAIN DISPATCHER’S ERROR COSTS TWENTY-FIVE LIVES. Excursion Train anil Frelffbt Collide In New Hampshire While Under Hivh Speed—Twenty-Five Are Killed Ontrtsht Twenty-five lives were sacrificed to a telegraph operator’s blunder and thirty other persons were badly injured in a train wreck which occurred Just before daylight Sunday four miles west of Canaan Station inNew Hampshire on the Concord division of the Boston and Maine Ihulieoad. An operator at Canaan station, it Is said, by misconstruing orders sent a freight train directly in the path of a crowded excursion train. The two trains met ltt a hfead on collision at high speed. The resulting crasli made a pile of splinters out of a light day coach whigh was crowded with women and children who were returning from a fair at Sherbrooke, Province of Quebec, IGO miles over the Canadian border. t

The excursion train was rounding a curve four miles west of Canaan Station when the engineer saw the headlight of the freight train. The passenTEer tram was running down grade and had attained a speed of nearly fifty miles an hour. There was no chance of averting a collision, as the curve at that point is sharp jind the trains were within a few feet of each other when the engineers saw the danger. Brakes were thrown on and the engine crews jumped to safety. The excursionists did not have a Second's warning. The jar caused by the setting of the brakes was followed by a grinding crash-and the coaches doubled up as if they had been made of cardboard. The baggage car, directly behind- the engine, telescoped the coach and reduced it to kindling wood It was hours before some of the Injured were taken frSm under the wreck. When the last body was taken from the,wreck it was found that twenty-four bad been killed outright and that others w’ere so badly hurt that they would die.

The baggage car in the rear of the engine was hurled back into the crowded day coach like a great rain and tore it asunder from end to end. As it did so the rear end of the baggage car rose up, so that when it stopped at the forward end of the smoker, after tearing through the day coach, the car was almost perpendicular. The shattered day coach was crowded with more than fifty people. Shortly before the accident a few of the men had gone hack into the smoking car in the rear, leaving the women to get a little sleep in the straight seats. One of those who escaped said that as the train was rounding the curve some one in the front began to sing, so that nearly every one was awake when the crash came.’