Back Home in Indiana

It was dark, and fog hanging over the flat Indiana countryside rushed steadily back into the glare of the headlight of the Dixie Flyer, pounding south from Chicago. Locomotive Engineer Frank Blair stared hard ahead, to catch the dim gleam of the rails. Suddenly, about five miles from Terre Haute, he saw something which few railroad engineers have seen, under the modern railroad signal systems.* Into the headlight sprang the headlight of another locomotive, on the single track ahead. Frank Blair's palm hit the throttle; he jerked at the air brakes. The huge drivers screeched and slid, and Engineer Blair dived out of the cab.

Behind the Dixie Flyer's tender were two baggage cars and 14 coaches. In the first three coaches rode 75 Army Air Forces pilots, gunners and radiomen. Most of them had flown dangerous missions over Italy, had earned and spent 30 days at home in the U.S. Now, assigned to duty in the U.S., they were bound for Miami. Before they went to bed, they yelled, sang, talked with a luxurious feeling of safety about bombing raids. The crash that sent their sleepers rolling into the soybean fields beside the track killed 25 of them within seconds.

The trains, operated by the Chicago & Eastern Illinois Railroad, collided at 2:20 a.m. The crash woke Albert Kellett and his wife Ruth. Kellett threw back the covers sleepily and looked out the window. Lights were glowing strangely in the fog over the railroad right of way; soon he began to hear men screaming in the dark fields. Then the boiler of one of the locomotives blew up. Kellett telephoned for help and ran out into the night. Some of the airmen were crying for morphine; others stumbled aimlessly through the blood-spattered wreckage.

Engineer Frank Blair died from burns--he had landed safely after his leap, only to be scalded by the bursting boiler. Twenty-eight other men, 26 of them soldiers, also died, and 40 were taken to hospitals. As next morning's sunlight cleared the fog, thousands of people gathered near the tracks, and a man with a tinkling bell on his automobile sold hundreds of Popsicles. Major W. J. Wegg, who had commanded the Air Forces group on the train, went to the Terre Haute House and wearily ordered a bottle of Budweiser. As he lifted it he said slowly: "This is home. Nothing like this should happen here."

* Casey Jones, who died a few seconds after "Number Four stared him right in the face," met his end before the days of automatic signal blocks.

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