A RAILWAY HORROR.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIV, Issue 8057, 19 September 1887, Page 6

A RAILWAY HORROR.

100 EXCURSIONISTS KILLED.

FULLY 400 INJURED.

TERRIBLE SUFFERINGS,

THIEVES AT WORK.

THE DEAD ROBBED AND MUTILATED. Out (rom Peoria, 111., Wednesday evening, August 10, sped a special train with fifteen ooaohee, crowded with over nine hundred gay, happy-hearted excursionists. Just before midnight, as drawn by two engines it passed through Chatsworth at rapid speed, the engineer saw, to his horror, a burning bridge ahead. Death, and a dreadful death, was there, inexorable. Into the fire and down through the bridge the train piuoged in an awful wreck. .Over 100 people were killed outright, and four times that number injured. Seventy-three bodies, mangled almost beyond recognition, have been taken from the wreck. The work of rescue was a hard and brave one by the survivors. It is fully told in the despatches below. LDNQtNO TO DEATH. The train was composed of six sleeping cars, six day coaches and chair oars, and three baggage. It was carrying 960 passengers, all excursionists, and was bound for Niagara Falls. The train was so heavy that two engines were hitohed to it. Three miles east of Chatsworth is a little slough, and where the railroad crosses a dry run about ten feet deep and fifteen feet wide. Over this was stretched an ordinary wooden trestle bridge, and aa the excursion train came thundering down on it, what was the horror of the engineer on the front engine •when he saw that this bridge was on fire. Right up before his eyes leaped the bright fl*mes, and the next instant be was in the fiery furnace. There was no chance to stop. Had there been warning half a mile would have been needed to stop that on rushing mass of wood, iron, and human lives, and the train was within 100 yards of the red tongued messenger of death before the fatal signal flashed into the engineer 1 face. But he passed over in safety, the first engine keeping the rails. As it went over the bridge fell beneath it, and it oould only have been the terrific speed of the train which saved the lives cf the engineer and his fireman. The next engine wont down, an 1 instantly the deed of death wan done. Car crashed into car, coaches piled one on top of another, and in the twiukling of an eye nearly one hundred peeple found instant death, and fifty more were so hurt they could not live. As for the wounded, they were everywhere. Only the sleeping coaches escaped, and as the startled and half dressed passengers came tumbling out of them they tound a scene of horrid death, and such work to do that it seemed as if human hands were utterly incapable. It lacked but five minutes of midnight. KIRK ADDS ITS HORROR. Instantly the air was filled with the cries of the wounded and the shrieks of the dying. The groans of men and the screams of women united to make an appalling sound, and above all could be heard the agonising ories of little children who lay pinned alongside their dead parents. And there was another terrible danuer yet to be met. The bridge was still on fire, and the wrecked cars were lying on and around the fiercely burning embers. Everywhere in the wreck were wounded and unhurt men, women and children, whose lives could be saved if they could be gotten out, bat whose death—and death in a most horrible formwas certain if the twisted wood of the broken cars caught fire. To fight the fire there was not a drop of water, and only some fifty able-bodied men who still had pretence of mind and nerve enough to do their duty. The only light was the light of the burning bridge. And with so much of its aid the fifty men went to work to fight the flames. For four hours they fought like fiends, and for four hours the viotory hung in the balance. Earth was the only weapon with which the foe could be fought, aud so the attempt was made to smother it out. There was no piok or shovel to dig it up, no baskets or barrows to carry it, and so deiperate were they that they dug their lingers down into the earth, whioh a long drought had baked almost as hard as stone, and heaped the precious handfuls thus hardly won upon the encroaching flames, and with this earthwork, built handful by handful, kept ba'jk the foe. So they dug up the earth with their hands, reckless of the blood streaming out from broken finger nails, and heaping it up in little mounds, while all the while came the heartrending cry " For God's sake don't let as burn to death." Finally the viotory was won. The fire was put out after four hours of endeavour, and as its last sparks died aw;iy, the light oame up in the east, and dawn came upon a scene of horror. MEN WOR3IS THAN GHOUI S. No sooner had the wreck ocourred than a scene of robbery commenced. Some band of abominable, heartless miscreants was on hsnd, and like the guerillas who throng a battlefield the night after the conflict and filch from the dead the money which they received for their meagre pay, stealing even the bronzH medals and robbing from the children of heroes the other worthless emblem# of their fathers' bravery, so did thsse human hyenas plunder the dead from this terrible aooident, and take even the shoes which covered their feet. Who these wretches are is not now known. Whether they were a band of pickpockets who accompanied the train or some robber gang who were lurking in the vicinity, cannot be said. The horrible suspicion, however, exists and there are many who give it credit—that the accident was a deliberately planned case of train wrecking ; that the bridge was set on fire by miscreants who hoped to seize the opportunity offered. It seems hardly possible that man could be so so lost to all the ordinary feeling whioh animates the basest of the human race, but still men who will rob dead men, who will steal from the dying and will plunder the wounded, held down by the broken beams of a wreaked oar, wounded whose death by fire seemed imminent, can do almost anything whioh is base ; and that is what these human fiends did. They went into the cars when the fire was burning fiercely underneath, and when the poor wretches who were pinned there begged them "for God's sake to help them out," stripped them of their watches and jewellery, and searched their pockets for money. When the dead bodies were laid out in the corn fields those hyenas turned them over in their search for valuables, and that the plundering wag done by an organised gang was proven by the fact that this morning out in the corn field sixteen purses, all empty, were found in one heap. It was a ghastly plundering, and had the plunderers been oaught, they would surely have been lynched. SCENES AND INCIDENTS. H. W. White, one of the survivors, says : —One of the horrible incidents was a man well dressed who was so badly injured that his bowels were protruding. He called passionately for water, and as he could not be attended to, he finally pulled out his revolver and shot himself through the head. One little boy, the son of the Methodist minister at Abington, Frank Suadecker, was found on the bosom of his dead mother. His left leg hung by the skin, his right arm was broken, and one eye was put out. He never uttered a groan as thoy pulled him out, and tried to give him a drink of brandy. He refused to take it, and said, " Give me water." lie never uttered a groan. I found a heart hanging from the truck. It was apparently a man, and had been caught by the air. I found several headless bodies. Those who recognised thedead immediately ticketed them. There was one incident of the accident whioh stood out more honible than all of those horrible scenes. In the second coaoh was a man, his wife and little child. When thr> accident occurred the entire family of three was caught, and held down by broken woodwork. Finally, when relief came, the man turned to the friend and feebly said :—" Take out my wife first. I'm afraid the child is dead." So they carried out the mother, and as a broken seat was takm off her crushed breast, the blood which welled from her lips told how badly she was hurt. They carried the child, a fair-haired, blue-eyed girl of three, aud Said her in the corn field, dead, alongside of her dying mother. Then they went back for the father and brought him out. Both his legs were broken, but he crawled through the corn to the side of his wife, and fooling her loved features in the darkness pressed some brandy to her lips and asked her how she felt. A feeble groan was the only answer, and the next instant she died. The man felt the forms of hia dead wife and jhild, and cried out, " My God, there is nothing more for me to live for now," and taking a pistol from his pocket, pulled the trigger. The bullet went surely through his brain, and the three dead bodies of that little family lay side by Bide amid -be waving corn.