TWO TERRIBLE ACCIDENTS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CVI, Issue 12621, 2 October 1901, Page 5

TWO TERRIBLE ACCIDENTS.

EXPLOSION ON A RIVER STEAMER. DREADFUL RAILWAY COLLISION. (Per Ventura, at Auckland.) . . SAN FRANCISCO, Sept,' 13. Three hundred! passengers on the'steamer City of. Trenton had)'a narrow escape "on August 23, when the steamer was burned in the° Delaware River and twenty persons were burned or drowned. It. is admitted! that the steamer was racing up the river to Philadelphia'when the boiler exploded and the vessel caught fire, and after being beach© J on the Pennsylvania side of. the. river was burned to the hull. It is regarded aig a miracle that any of the passengers escaped'. The explosion threw;a number of persona overboard, and carried away both upper decks. The remaining'boiler made it possible to inn the burning vessel ashore. Both sides • of the river were lined with boat-houses, and men with boats put out from these to .rescue the passengers, who were panic-stricken.' The captain- and crew were heroic, and the captain was the last to leave the burning: vessel. .The wounded were' carried l to an hospital, three miles away, and 1 men.' and women, with their flesh hanging in strips, bore their sufferings like stoics. ' . ;

Nearly forty' lives were lost in- a railway collision in Montana on August 31. AH the. victims were cremated in a fire which consumed the wreck. These included Superintendent P. L.. Downs, of the Great Northern Railway, and 1 his son; T. Kirk Downs* who were travelling in a private car, which received the (full 1 -force of a colliding freight train which crashed in from the rear.- There is a severe grade near the scene .of the wreck. Two engines • had taken a train cf twenty-eight' freight cars up t'he grade- and' drawn off to take water. AM the freight cars started' backward down the grade. The runaway train attained a frightful speed, jumped an open .switch which should have saved .the passenger train, and struck a caboose" and coach .standing on the siding. A fire started from the oil. lamps in the caboose. The point where the.wild train crashed into the senger train was several hundred feet further on, and it was two and a half hours before the flames reached the main wreck. Meantime frantic efforts were .made to take out the dead' and living persons imprisoned' there. .The wreck was piled high in hopeless confusion, and the flames burned their way to the cars before, the work was completed.