Flashback

At the crest of a long Allegheny mountain grade last week, the Pennsylvania's slick Sunshine Special stopped to uncouple an engine. Suddenly, the rear Pullman broke loose. Like a runaway in the Perils of Pauline, it swept back downhill.

Flagman Edward J. Mulvihill tried the brake; when it failed he ordered the passengers from their berths, told them to lie flat on the floor. For 3 1/2 miles and about five minutes, they lived a common bad dream. The car teetered at 50 m.p.h. around Bennington Curve (where the Pennsylvania's Red Arrow had killed 24 in a wreck ten nights before), highballed a mile and a half more and took off into a mountainside. When it was over, brave Porter Lee Keys Jr., who had gone back to fight the handbrake on the rear platform, was dead, and ten passengers were ready for Altoona, Pa. hospitals, still crowded by victims from the Red Arrow.

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This week three other Pennsylvania trains were wrecked on a single night. At Freeport, Pa., Engineer W. T. Nixon was killed when his locomotive rammed a standing freight. At Belvidere, N.J., three were injured in a similar crash. And just east of the now infamous Bennington curve, three cars of an eastbound freight jumped the tracks.

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