Death at Dawn

The Santa Fe's stainless steel El Capitan, an all-coach express of 16 cars, glittered eastward at 90 m.p.h. on the last leg of the run from Los Angeles. It was 5:40 a.m., and Chicago was only 148 miles away. On an adjoining track, also Chicago-bound, the slower Kansas City Chief clicked along at a modest 65. In both trains, as they raced side by side near Monica, Ill., dawn and restlessness had prodded light sleepers into wakefulness. Washrooms were crowded with women prettying their faces and men shaving.

As El Capitan began sliding ahead of the Chief, crewmen on its big diesel heard "something dragging" underneath the mail coach--a brake rigging had broken and dropped to the ties. An instant later, the mail coach lurched off the rails, derailing the Capitan's passenger coaches behind it. Car 2918, El Capitan's middle coach, hurtled off the tracks and sideswiped the Chiefs locomotive, knocking it off the rails into the light brush along the right of way; the Chief's passenger cars jolted, but stayed on the track.

The swift-moving, light cars of El Capitan fared worse. Four of its coaches folded side by side like pleats in a giant steel concertina. Crewmen, and nearby farmers who arrived to help, needed sledge hammers, axes and acetylene torches to cut into some of them. Inside El Capitan's scarred skin were 388 passengers, almost all of them badly scared and shaken. Seventy-five were injured, and nine--most of them in Car 2918--were dead.

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