Late Train Home

A little before 10 p.m., Train No. 175 left Babylon and, rattling off through the suburban towns along the south shore of Long Island, headed west for Manhattan. A little after 10 p.m., 38 miles away, Train No. 192 left the Long Island Rail Road's dingy underground terminal in Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station, clattered through the tunnel under the East River and headed east. In the two electric trains, their lives converging noisily at a speed of 50 m.p.h., were some 1,000 passengers.

No. 192's twelve cars were carrying home the Long Island commuters who had stayed on after dinner to work late or to spend an evening in the city. Martin Steeil, 31, an automobile insurance underwriter, a veteran of the North African and German campaigns, had been bowling with the men from his -office. Steeil's wife and two-year-old son were waiting for him in Rockville Centre. Raymond Miller, 49, vice president of an insurance company, had been cleaning up his business before the weekend. He had just missed the 9:03 and had phoned his wife in Merrick, L.I. that he would be an hour late getting home. John Weeks, 30, a contributing editor of TIME and a PT-boat skipper in the Pacific war, had been to a Mexican movie on which he was planning to do a story. Weeks's wife and two small sons were waiting for him in Merrick. Steeil, Miller, Weeks and twoscore others rode in the head car, the smoker, some reading the night's newspapers, most of them sunk in boredom, a few sunk in sleep.

No. 192 rushed and jolted eastward through Kew Gardens, Jamaica, St. Albans, Valley Stream, the boringly familiar, dirty, rickety commuters' run--always unpleasant, usually late and hopelessly snarled in rush hours and bad weather. No. 175 rushed and jolted westward--through Lindenhurst, Amityville, Seaford, Freeport--and pulled into Rockville Centre.

The Gantlet. In Rockville Centre (pop. 20,000), where the tracks run at street level right through the town, Long Island trains for many years have jammed up street traffic at rush hours, have killed nine persons and injured 24 in the past twelve years in grade-crossing accidents. State and railroad, at long last, were building an overpass. While the work was going on, trains were being run, one way at a time, over about 2,000 feet of "gantlet" tracks--with the left rail of the westbound track inside the eastbound rails. (A gantlet eliminates the need for a switch.)

Having picked up its Rockville Centre passengers, No. 175 headed up the gantlet toward New York City again. James Markin, in the motorman's cubicle, started to pick up speed, had time only to yank his whistle before disaster struck.

Apparently disregarding a warning block signal, apparently blind to the glare of No. lys's approaching headlight, Motorman Jacob Kiefer took No. 192 down the section of double track and roared on into the gantlet. Markin's whistle was a shrill and hopeless warning of the rending crash of steel on steel as the two trains collided.

The head cars plowed along each other's flanks, peeling back the sides with a shriek of tearing metal, rolling up steel, seats, hats, briefcases, newspapers, human bodies into two great, tortured wads of debris at the ends of the cars. The second car of No. 175 buckled, jumped the track and fell against the embankment of the new overpass. The trains came to a standstill in a second of dark and shuddering silence.

The Nightmare. Stunned by the dreadful roar of the collision, Mrs. Evelyn Mc-Tootle, proprietress of the nearby Sunset Inn Bar & Grill, thought "a boiler was blowing up." She ran out to the street. A conductor jumped out of one of the trains and yelled at her to turn in an alarm. Mrs. McTootle did as she was told, then filled a cooking pot with water and made for the wreck.

The night had split open into horror and confusion. Men & women trapped in the cars screamed to be let out. Some managed to crawl through smashed windows and stagger aimlessly into the darkness.

The wails of fire sirens sounded through Rockville Centre. Townspeople ran toward the tracks and stood there, staring in frozen horror. Police and firemen began working their way through the wreckage, climbing over the cars, battering and prying with crowbars and sledge hammers. Soon, floodlights whitely bathed the scene. A crowd of 30,000 watched from the trackside.

Welders burned their way through twisted steel. Doctors crawled after them, administering morphine, amputating limbs to extricate still breathing people. A man impaled on a steel beam pleaded for someone to kill him.

Rescuers, smeared with blood, lifted out the living and the dead, and the parts of bodies and the briefcases and the clothing. A man sat by a shattered window looking, as one rescuer later recalled, "like he was going on a trip--but the top of his head was cut off." Some bodies had been decapitated; others, living and dead, were smashed and twisted between the ragged chunks of broken steel.

The Dead. It was six hours after the crash before the last survivor or corpse was lifted from the wreckage.

They laid the dead in the little Negro Second Baptist Church beside the tracks. Mrs. McTootle, padding through .the nightmare, still carrying water from her kitchen, remembered, "There was blood all over the floor. In one corner was a shoe with a foot in it."

Sickened friends and relatives identified the remains--Raymond Miller, who had just missed the 9:03, Martin Steeil, John Weeks, 26 others who had been in the head cars of No. 192 and No. 175. More than 100 were injured, many critically. It was the bankrupt Long Island's worst wreck, and the worst railroad wreck in the U.S. since April 1946, when 45 were killed on the Burlington Railroad at Naperville, Ill.

This week the Public Service Commission began its investigation. Both motormen, who had been riding in their cubicles on the comparatively intact right sides of the two cars, had survived. Markin had only minor injuries. Kiefer, apparently thrown clear, was suffering from severe shock. A veteran engineman of 26 years service, 55-year-old Jacob Kiefer was arrested and charged with criminal negligence.

But no one thought that Kiefer alone would have to bear the burden of the catastrophe. Even if he had failed to see the warning signal, why had the slipshod Long Island, unwanted and neglected stepchild of the great Pennsylvania Railroad*,failed to install automatic stopping devices, which Manhattan subways had had for 48 years? Fed up with years of gross-incompetence on a system that carries more passengers than any other U.S. railroad (300,000 daily), and appalled by the disastrous accident, commuters made an indignant demand: investigate the whole operation of the Long Island, rescue it from what passengers were sure was its undisputed status as the worst Class I railroad in the U.S.

-The Long Island Rail Road was bought in 1900 by the Pennsylvania. After 1935, with the exception of three war years, the Long Island lost money, and in March 1949 the Pennsylvania declared it bankrupt and said it was on its own. A few months later, the Nassau County Transit Commission charged that the Pennsylvania had systematically milked its subsidiary. It charged that: for the L.I.'s tugs and barges to move freight across New York Harbor, the Pennsy paid the L.I. only 35-c- a ton, collected as much as $1.10 from shippers; the Pennsy and the N.Y., N.H. & H. used some eleven miles of Long Island tracks, paid only half of what the fee should have been; the Pennsy leased the Long Island's Wheelspur Yard for a piddling $13,000 in 1948, forced the L.I. to deadhead its own cars to less accessible yards at a cost of $370,000 a year. "Complete misunderstanding of the facts," snapped the Pennsy. When the L.I. went into bankruptcy Pennsy filed claims of close to $53 million.

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