"Wait a Bit..."

At 3:23 a.m., the double-engined streamliner, Red Arrow, bellowed out of a black Allegheny Mountain tunnel and began a long downgrade run for the famed Bennington Curve.* She was an hour late. Conductor J. A. McCormick felt the speedup as he walked through the lounge car toward a Pullman up ahead. Suddenly he stopped: "I sensed something--I don't know what--telling me to wait a bit."

He waited less than a minute. Driving into the curve ten miles west of Altoona, Pa., the lead locomotive of the crack Pennsylvania sleeper lost its footing. With a night-splitting roar, it ground into the ties, buckled, and took off over a 55-ft. embankment, pulling with it the second locomotive, a baggage car, three Pullmans and a diner.

Side by side on the black bank, the steaming locomotives lay helplessly. Their crews, except for one engineman, were dead. Around them, like spilled matchsticks, were the baggage car (six dead) and the twisted Pullmans. In one, a rabbi whose legs were pinned under shapeless rubble murmured prayers for the injured and dying. Near him, a Red Cross worker chattered and sang to a blur of protruding arms and legs and bloodstained pillows while she tried to free her hand from a crushing weight. In another mess of metal, a soldier whose uncle lay dead near his feet quietly sipped water while he waited for rescuers to cut him free with acetylene torches. Near by, eight circus midgets trapped in a saw-toothed corner of a coach were pulled free.

When the coroners and hospital trainmen arrived to search for the 24 dead and the 121 injured, scores of shaken wordless, half-clad survivors still wandered aimlessly in the mountain dawn. Nobody knew what had caused the Red Arrow to leave the track. For the moment, Conductor McCormick was too preoccupied with his strange presentiment to care. In the Pullman he had hesitated to enter, a half dozen people had died.

-Four miles west of the Horseshoe Curve.

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