Death Rides the Long Island

On Thanksgiving Eve, at the hour when all of New York seems to pour out of office buildings at once, and the gloomy and echoing caverns of Pennsylvania Station fill with people, two Long Island commuter trains gulped up their nightly rations of humanity. Their doors clanged shut. The Hempstead-bound 6:09 rattled out into the East River tunnel with 1,000 men and women jammed in the seats and aisles of its twelve cars. The Babylon-bound 6:13 pulled out behind it with 1,200 rush-hour passengers.

The passengers were part of a scarred, frustrated and endlessly complaining tribe --the 300,000 New York commuters who daily ride the rachitic, mismanaged Long Island Rail Road. They were also resigned. During a decade of endless criticism, the road's ramshackle trains--which link Long Island's sprawling suburbia to Manhattan and carry the biggest daily passenger load in the U.S.--had gone right on running late, bogging down in snowstorms, killing motorists at grade crossings and risking the lives of their passengers.

Thirty-two commuters had been killed last winter when two Long Island trains crashed head-on at Rockville Centre (TIME, Feb. 27). Wild and angry demands for reform had been raised, but the Long

Island, a bankrupt stepchild of the rich Pennsylvania Railroad, had done little to correct its miserable safety record. Still, most of its customers had no better means of transportation, so each day they hustled into crowded coaches like the 6:09 and the 6:13.

Rattling Dance. The two electric trains quickly emerged from the tunnel; then, for the better part of ten minutes they sped along, one behind the other, through the multi-windowed darkness of Queens.

Neither was scheduled to stop before Jamaica--the point at which twelve of the railroad's branch lines begin fanning out over the island. But when the leading 6:09 was still a mile from the station, an overhead block signal ordered a temporary halt and its motorman obediently applied his brakes. The train ground to a stop. But when the signal changed to "proceed," it refused to start; it groaned, lurched, and stalled dead on the tracks, apparently with its air brakes jammed.

Behind it the 6:13 rushed closer & closer, its coaches performing a rattling dance upon their trucks, its crowded passengers and their upraised newspapers swaying in rhythmic unison. Its engineer, a 55-year-old railroader named Benjamin Pokorney, fled past a stop signal 3,516 feet from the stalled 6:09 at 60 miles an hour, apparently gambling (as other engineers have before him) that the track ahead would clear in time. He had only 850 feet of rails left when his headlight told him the terrible truth.

He grabbed for his brakes, threw his motors into reverse--but he was too late. With a roar like an exploding artillery shell, the first car of the 6:13 buried itself, full length, in the last car of the 6:09. Both were crowded smokers; in one grinding and convulsive moment they were telescoped into a great steel package of mangled bodies, torn cushions, broken glass and twisted metal. Thin cries rose in the sudden silence.

Needles & Sparks. People rushing out of houses in the heavily populated city area along the tracks found themselves colliding in the dark with hundreds of people rushing out of the train. With no help at hand, dozens of dazed and bleeding survivors hurried off by themselves, like wounded animals, to make their own way to hospitals or homes. For minutes the tangled wreckage lay on the tracks as though it had been lost and forgotten, with only the roving flashlights of ladder-carrying householders to reveal glimpses of its horrors.

Then fire engines, police cars, ambulances and taxicabs began drawing up. Emergency floodlights bathed the shattered cars in an unearthly brilliance. Cops, firemen and workmen with big jacks scrambled toward the cars; doctors and nurses crept and crawled up ladders and into the wreckage, hypodermic needles in hand. Welders began to create their blinding cascades of sparks while firemen sprayed water past them to keep trapped humans from, burning. A jostling crowd gathered, a sound truck began rasping out commands.

The procession of dead and wounded seemed endless; men with stretchers pushed through the crowd to pile bodies in a nearby driveway, to carry the wounded to ambulances or into a nearby kitchen where surgeons operated on a table covered with bloody bedsheets. For 4 1/2 hours the two telescoped smokers stayed stubbornly locked together while the living moaned inside and a dead man stared fixedly from one window; then two huge cranes lifted the upper car, revealing bodies and debris wedged and jammed almost immovably, and the litters were loaded anew.

Shock-waves of news spread across Queens and the outlying suburbs; hundreds of terrified wives began telephoning hospitals, newspapers and radio stations, and 3,000 men & women answering a radio appeal formed long queues at Mary Immaculate Hospital to donate blood. The news grew steadily worse. The next day, with the hospitals full, and the tracks cleared of all debris, the casualty list totaled 77 dead, more than 300 injured.

It was the worst U.S. railroad wreck since the Pennsylvania's Congressional Limited was derailed in Philadelphia in 1943, killing 79 people. More shocking, it brought the Long Island's death list for the year to 109, as many as had been killed in all U.S. crashes on scheduled U.S. airlines in 1950. New York's newly elected Mayor Vincent Impellitteri hurried home from Cuba to order an investigation. Governor Thomas E. Dewey--who had vetoed a legislative bill aimed at weeding out railroad engineers with bad safety records--called on the bankrupt line's two court-appointed trustees to resign. They stolidly refused. A wave of vehement indignation swept New York. Newspapers baldly used the word "murder" in editorials (see PRESS), and millions of shocked and frightened citizens cried, "Now they'll HAVE to do something."

The Nassau County Transit Commission charged that the Pennsylvania Railroad had milked the Long Island financially for years before allowing it to go into bankruptcy. It was primarily a passenger road with only a minor percentage of the freight business which swelled the coffers of other rail lines. Its equipment was junky and the morale of its 7,500 employees was as low as that of its passengers.

Long Island residents prayed that a blue-ribbon investigating commission appointed by Governor Dewey (former Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson, former State Supreme Court Justice Charles C. Lockwood and New York Parks Commissioner Robert Moses) would work some miracle with their transport problems. It was certainly high time.

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