Shreve and Berea Ohio, January 1930, Ohio's Double Dose of Tragedy

Shreve Ohio School Bus/Train Crash-January 3 1930

Berea, Ohio School Bus/Train Crash- January 22 1930

A Double Dose of Tragedy in Ohio.

Shreve, Ohio Bus/Train Crash...January 3, 1930

The Thirties was a bad decade for school bus/train accidents. I'm talking a really bad decade, with six multi-fatality accidents that I found while researching material for this post. These six, BTW were just the worst of the school bus-train crashes that occurred during the decade that also played host to The Great Depression. There were also several train/bus crashes where only the driver was aboard when the accident happened, one or two others that only caused one or two fatalities apiece and never became national news, a couple that, by some miracle, resulted in no fatalities, and probably a couple that have somehow slipped through the cracks and fallen from the pages of history.

Not only were The Thirties a profoundly bad decade for school bus/train collisions, the tragedies started early and came quick, hitting Ohio with a tragic one-two punch. The new decade had barely gotten started good when not just one, but two major school bus-train accidents occurred within two weeks of each other, ripping the hearts out of two communities that were just sixty miles or so apart, both near Cleveland, Ohio. The first of the two was only three days into the new year.

For the first one we go just about 70 miles due south of Cleveland, to the small Wayne County town of Shreve, and head back in time to the late evening of  January 3^rd, 1930, very likely the first day back after Christmas break. The tiny town of Burbank, Ohio's girls and boys basketball teams were heading home after playing the first basketball game of the new year, and while the ladies lost a close contest the boys had just gotten a late Christmas present by beating one of their arch rivals...the Bulldogs of Big Prairie-Lakeville High School in the Holmes County hamlet of Big Prairie.

This was back in the day when every little town had it's own high school, and the schools in neighboring towns were often arch rivals on the grid-iron and basketball court. This was decades before today's Single A/Double A/ Triple A system went into effect...in essence every small town school was what today would be a Single A School...and every county had it's own high school sports league, made up of all of the small towns in the county. To fill the sports schedule out with games, each school also played a couple of schools from neighboring counties, and sometimes the arch-rivalry crossed county lines. 

That was the case with the rivalry between Burbank and Big Prairie. Big Prairie was actually just across the county line in Holmes County, Wayne County's neighbor to the south, and was about a 30 mile trip, which, on the rural roads of the day in a school bus, was probably at least a 45 minute or so ride if not a full hour. Now, this was January in Ohio, so the weather was not looking real promising when they set out on the thirty mile ride to Big Prairie. It was one of those 'It's not snowing yet, but you can tell it really wants to' days we're all familiar with, and that promise would bear fruit before the final whistle blew in the gym at Big Prairie.

Some things never change, no matter how many decades pass, and one of them is the atmosphere on board a team bus after a victory, especially if the vanquished foe is a big rival. I was manager for the Southampton County (Virginia) Jr High basketball team when I was in 8^th grade and I well remember those away games, especially if we won, and most especially if we beat a major rival. The ride home would not be a particularly quiet one. Such was the case as the victorious Burbank team left Big Prairie at around 10:15 PM on what had become a profoundly nasty January evening and headed out Ohio Route 226. Route 226's alignment hasn't changed in going on 87 years, and back in 1930 it bisected the small town of Shreve, Ohio, about four and a half miles east and north of Big Prairie, just as it does now. Also unchanged is the railroad...the legendary Pennsylvania Railroad in 1930, now, I believe, part of CSX...slicing diagonally through town in a gentle curve, and crossing Rt 226 at just about the exact center of town.

Now, here's the kicker...this was not a completely unprotected crossing...it was protected by a warning bell mounted on or near the cross bucks on both sides of the track, and I read one source that stated that there was also a flashing light (If there was one, it was likely a single small flashing red light mounted with the bell rather than the alternating light signals we're so familiar with today.) The crossing was also protected by a watchman from six or so in the morning to 10PM, but that wouldn't be a factor...the watchman had likely cursed the sleet and snow that had started falling and headed for home when his shift ended, thirty minutes or so before the bus with the kids from Burbank rolled into Shreve

Driver Joe Baker had his work cut out for him...it was spitting snow and sleet, the roads were getting nasty, and the 16 kids on board the bus were boisterously celebrating their victory as they rolled into Shreve at just before 10:30PM. The trip from Big Prairie to Shreve was usually about a ten or so minute ride, but the snow was slowing them down, dragging the trip take out to almost twenty minutes. Baker slowed even more as he rolled into town.

Now this was a small town in 1930...the sidewalks, as they say, had been rolled up. There were a few lights burning within homes and in the back of some stores, and possibly some street lights along 226, but it was generally a snow-swaddled evening as the bus rolled north. The night wasn't completely dark, but was rather kind of glowing with that semi-luminescence that comes with falling snow. The bus...almost definitely unheated and closed up tight as a drum...was filled with the happy sound of teenagers who'd just kicked their arch rivals butts as well as the not-at all quiet drive train and engine of a mid or late Twenties vintage medium duty truck, because that's what the bus body was likely mounted on. And while we're at it, the bus body was probably nothing like what we think of today as a 'School Bus', depending on the age of the bus. If it was built before 1927, it was probably wooden, with perimeter seats running along the sidewalls of the vehicle and the kids sitting with their backs to the sidewall rather than the double rows of seats we're used to today. OH...while we're at it, there's a good possibility that it was not yellow...yellow as the standard school bus color wouldn't come along for another few years.

A bus very likely similar to the one involved in the Shreve, Ohio accident...Given that the kids in the front of the bus survived with minor to moderate injuries, it had to be a fair sized bus. Also, notice two things about this ride (Besides the fact that the bus is right hand drive)...the color and the seats. This ride was painted a dark color...yellow as a standard school bus color was still half a decade or more away and 'School Bus Yellow' wasn't adopted as the national standard until 1939. Also, you can see the edge of the right side perimeter seats through the open door. While the seats are padded, and this bus is equipped with a conventional right front folding door entrance, it had the same perimeter bench seats that were carryovers from horse drawn 'Kid Hacks' and that many early motorized buses were equipped with when new well into the early thirties...school buses with perimeter seating didn't completely disappear until all of the older rides that were equipped with them were retired, a few lasting into the mid or late 40s.

As the bus crawled north through the falling snow, a Pennsylvania Railroad mail/passenger train was approaching the crossing westbound, running about 45 miles per hour. The fireman was stoking the firebox, either shoveling coal into the flaming maw or tending to the automatic stoker if the locomotive was equipped with one, so he wasn't looking out of the cab's left side picture window until just before they reached the crossing. On the right side of the cab, as they passed the whistle board 1500 or so feet from the crossing, the engineer reached up and started yanking the whistle cord, blasting the engine's whistle in the traditional long-short-long-long crossing warning signal.

To this day no one's really sure exactly what happened next. Route 226 climbed a slight grade as it approached the crossing, and the tracks crossed the road an an angle, but the angle was in a northbound drivers favor...he'd barely have to turn his head to look down the tracks to the right. Now, there were houses or other buildings built right up to the tracks, so a driver's view was pretty well compromised until he got right up to the crossing's 'stop' line. The driver of any north-bound vehicle approaching the crossing would have to take extra care, and make sure he stopped clear of the tracks, but close enough look up the tracks towards the curve to check for an oncoming train....

But wait a minute!...this crossing was protected by a bell! (Probably at least partially because of that train-hiding curve, and partially because the crossing was located in the center of a town)  That should have provided plenty of warning if it was working...and according to a couple of eye witnesses who happened to be out and about, the crossing bells activated just as they were supposed to. They also stated that they could hear the train's whistle, and see the headlight stabbing through the snow...it being night and snowing may have made the train a little easier to spot, and anyone who's seen a train approaching in rain or snow knows exactly what I'm talking about here. Even back in the 30s train headlights were far brighter than car head lights, and you'd very likely see that beam stabbing through the snow, at an angle, a good bit before the train popped around the curve. But...to see it, you'd have to look for it! And the driver just plain long didn't do that, because those same eye witnesses stated that they saw the bus start up grade, slow a bit for just an instant, then, as the driver grabbed another (Probably lower) gear, accelerate onto the crossing...

Satellite view of Shreve, with the accident crossing...still in place 86 years after the crash...circled in red. The route the bus took into town is indicated by blue dashes.

Satellite view of the accident crossing...while the crossing is now, of course, equipped with gates and signals, it's laid out just about exactly as it was in 1930. It was, of course, snowing and sleeting that night, and the train was actually coming out of a pretty good right hand curve as it approached the crossing, but the driver, if he'd stopped and looked, would have still been able to see the train.

Street view, approaching the crossing. The buildings on the east side of Market Street (Ohio Rt 226) in downtown Shreve as you approach the crossing from about a block or so away are the same ones that were there back in 1930. Of course on that long ago Jan 3rd it was night time and snowing, so look at this and the next two pics, then close your eyes and imagine it at night...in the snow...

View of the crossing from the present day 'Stop' line for the crossing signals. While there's a modern building on the right now, I'd lay bets that there used to be a two story brick building similar to the ones in the first street view there. OK, with that and the tree line, if it existed in 1930, the train would have been completely hidden from this position,.but then again it probably hadn't popped around the curve yet. Also, back then the crossbuck, bell, and stop line would have probably been about where the crossing signal is now...and if the driver had stopped there...

This is from right at the crossing signal, as I noted, roughly where the stop line probably was 86 years back. Note the track coming out of the curve to the right...you'd still give you plenty of time to see an oncoming train...if you stopped.

  NOW! Use your imagination...It's night and a nasty combination of snow and sleet's falling...not blizzard conditions by any means, but still enough to reduce visibility. You get to the crossing's stop line and stop. You think you hear a whistle and, as you look to your right you see snow and sleet dancing in a powerful beam of light for several seconds as the ground kind of shakes a little and you hear that unmistakable CHF-CHF-CHF-CHF of a big steam locomotive under load. Then it pops around the curve, running close to sixty, belchinging steam from it's cylinder exhausts and punching a column of smoke skyward as it as it roars past the nose of your car, dragging a string of lit-up passenger cars behind it  headed for points unknown...

Ok, imagination off...the point of that little narrative being, even in the snow, you could've see the train for several seconds before it actually popped around the curve because of the head light. The bus driver could have seen the train, gang. If he'd stopped. And looked.  But he didn't.

...In most of these accidents, the crew aboard the locomotive has seen the impending tragedy start to unfold a few seconds before they hit, early enough for the engineer to slam the brakes into emergency, but that didn't happen in Shreve that snowy evening. The fireman may have glimpsed the bus, which emerged from behind a building near the tracks, moving towards the crossing, an instant before they hit, and he may have shouted a warning, but nothing I found indicates that the train crew had more than a second or two to react. On the contrary they may not have seen the bus at all before they hit. Engineer F Zick's view of the landscape to the left of the locomotive was blocked by the locomotive itself, as was his view directly in front of the locomotive. So he most definitely didn't see anything until an instant before they hit, if then. At the most, he may have glimpsed something materialize in front of him as the front end of the bus cleared the crossing, then it took an instant or so for his brain to analyze what he was seeing, compose the likely loudly shouted 'AWWWW (Pick a curse word), and send his hand in a desperate grab for the brake handle...it probably took a second at the very most for him to slam the brake handle back into emergency, but by then the bus was already tumbling to the right...north...of the tracks. In the cab of the big steamer, the crew probably didn't even feel the impact, and barely heard it...but they could see the crumpled bus as they slid past.

On the bus, the beam from the locomotive headlight glared through the right-side windows, turning it as bright as daylight and giving the kids maybe a half second of warning...The kids on the left side of the bus went deer in the head lights, a couple of the kids on the right side may have started to turn to look over their shoulders before the front end of the locomotive ripped into the right rear of the bus. The rear of the bus body all but exploded and eight or ten of the kids were slung out into the snow, seven of them, two of whom were brothers, dying instantly. The bus spun clockwise, landing about 100 feet from the crossing.

The engineer didn't slam the brakes into emergency until an instant after they hit the bus, and the locomotive slid a good thousand feet or so before it stopped. The train crew as well as some of the passengers...who had been rudely jerked and bounced as the brakes went into emergency...bailed off of the train and headed for the bus. One of the crew may have trotted around to the front of the locomotive to see if any bodies had ended up on the pilot or front platform, which was a common occurrence in train/motor vehicle accidents of that era.. The others started running up on bodies a good two hundred feet from the bus.

There were more than a few miracles that night, too...this was one of those accidents where there were either fatalities or, with a couple of exceptions, only bumps and bruises. One girl had possible internal injuries and two broken legs, another ,whose brother was killed, suffered a broken leg. The others...all of whom, I have a feeling, were sitting in the front of the bus...suffered bumps, bruises, cuts, and a couple more fractures. The driver and coach, sitting at the very front of the ride, were the least injured of the bunch...as the train crew, passengers, and residents who'd heard the collision descended on the scene they were helping the less injured kids, who'd apparently managed to stay with the bus as it spun away from the crossing.

Phone calls were made to Wooster...about ten miles away...requesting ambulances, but with the roads getting steadily worse it would take awhile for them to arrive. While neither article I found specifically mentioned it, I have a feeling the kids were helped aboard the train or taken to near-by houses to await the arrival of ambulances. And, this being 1930, while ambulances responded as quickly as the storm permitted, and transported the injured as quickly as possible...well, that's about it. There was no prehospital care back then, other than some bandaging and splinting. Luckily most of the injured kids suffered only cuts, bruises, and simple fractures...injuries that the ambulance attendants of the time may have actually been trained and equipped to handle. Generally though, in that era, being taken to the hospital in an ambulance was pretty much riding a fast taxi with lights and sirens. (Everything was transported under emergency conditions back then, from heart attacks to hangnails). 

 As often happens with away games to this very day, especially if the team's having a good season and the opponent's a big rival, a slew of the Burbank faithful made the trip to Big Prairie as well, driving their own cars, and most had left before the bus. I can picture the scene at the school, as they waited in the parking lot, first wondering just how the heck slow Joe Baker was driving for Pete's sake, then becoming concerned, then worried, than frantic, until finally someone got a phone call and hurried to the school to let the group of parents and fans waiting for the bus know what had happened. Then there was a mad rush through the snow back to Shreve. By the time they started back, all of the injured kids had been transported to Wooster's two hospitals and the majority of the bodies taken to the morgue. 

A similar scene today, involving a bus and multiple injuries, would look like a light show to anyone approaching the scene an hour or so into the incident, with a dozen or more pieces of fire and rescue apparatus and a score of law enforcement vehicles punching pulses of red, blue, and white light into the night. The scene would be crawling with dozens of well trained personnel. Bodies would still be in place...covered...and an hour or so in the injured would all have been transported, or, if they had been trapped and needed to be extricated, would be in the process of being transported. A couple of medical helicopters...a tool not even dreamed of in 1930... might be in a nearby field awaiting patients.  A perimeter would be set up, with non Fire/EMS/Law Enforcement personnel kept back a couple of hundred yards...at the very least...from the scene. Most likely an officer or two or three would be assigned the specific task of interacting with the parents and helping them find out the status of their kids.

Back eighty-five years ago, though, things were way more, for a better word, informal than they are now. I can just about bet that there were only a few emergency vehicles on scene at a time, even early into the incident, and by the time worried parents began arriving an hour or two into the incident there were probably none, or, at most, a Sheriff's Department car or two. Once the track was cleared, the train continued on it's trip. Parents and spectators could walk right up to...and onto...the scene, which by the time they arrived, very likely consisted only of the shattered bus and the debris trial it left behind as it tumbled..  

There was also probably no accountability as to what patient went to what hospital, leaving the parents completely in the dark. (This is one problem that hasn't been entirely worked out to this very day, because getting a large number of injured patients stabilized and transported often takes priority over recording just who went where.). They began an all too familiar and all too frantic place to place search, looking for their kids. They first went to the two hospitals, where eight joyous reunions occurred, parents and sons or daughters hugging madly, the parents crying tears of joy, the kids asking about their friends. Seven more sets of parents, their hearts heavy with dread, went to the morgue, where wails of agony were heard.

Joe Baker couldn't remember if he'd stopped at the crossing or not, but remember...a couple of eye witnesses stated that he slowed up, but didn't stop. Remember also that this was actually a signal protected crossing though the signals were, at best, pretty rudimentary, so he may not have legally been required to stop. I haven't been able to find a copy of the Ohio traffic laws as they were written in 1930, but school buses being required to stop at all crossings, whether they were signal-protected or not, was still a good way down the road. Both morally and common sense wise, of course, he certainly should have stopped. 

While the crossing had a bell signal, it's obvious that he didn't hear it...or if he did, didn't recognize it for what it was. And there were definitely factors working against him hearing it. The unheated bus was closed up tight do to the weather, he had a group of jubilant teenagers who'd, less than an hour earlier, kicked the collective bootay of their arch rivals in a hard fought b-ball game aboard, and the bus was straining, climbing a grade, factors that not only could have kept him from hearing the crossing bell, but the locomotive whistle as well. And, just to make matters worse, it was sleeting to beat the band. All of us have driven or ridden during a sleet storm, and well know the manic hissing rattle of heavy sleet hitting the windshield and roof.

Whether he heard the bell or not is sort of a moot point, though, because he should have just stopped the bus and looked, whether he heard a bell or not. And I know, there were buildings right on top of the tracks and the weather was redefining 'Nasty', but no matter how close to the tracks the nearest buildings were and how hard it was snowing and sleeting, he most definitely would have seen the locomotive's head light if he'd stopped and looked. While the track crossed the road at an angle, the track slanted from northeast to southwest, making the westbound train easier to see from the northbound bus...all Baker should have had to have done, had he stopped, would have been to turn his head to the right and look at an angle through the windshield. 

But he didn't stop. And this time 'Complacency' can't be used as an excuse, as poor an excuse as it always is. This was not a normal daily run, but a trip home from a basketball game along a route he likely didn't drive regularly, especially at night and most especially at night during nasty weather. If anything he should have been twice as cautious as usual..

I have a feeling the root cause of this one's pretty simple. I think he was concentrating on getting up the grade leading to the tracks on the rapidly-becoming-slick road and, distracted by all the noise on the bus, didn't even think to look for a train until the locomotive's headlight flooded the interior of the bus with a deadly glow. And because of this, seven kids lost their lives in the blink of an eye.

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The kids who lost their lives in the accident:

Wilbur Grube

Forest Grube

Wayne Lehman

Emil Timic

Eugene Talley

Willard Baker

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Thing is, Tragedy hadn't finished with Ohio yet.

Berea, Ohio School Bus/Train Crash...January 22, 1930

Just nineteen days later, and sixty or so miles north, with the Shreve, Ohio accident still fresh in everyone's mind, tragedy struck again when a school bus driver made a fatal mistake that's still all too common at railroad crossings....he was too impatient.

Berea, Ohio is a suburb of Cleveland, with just about 20,000 souls calling it home today. In January 1930 it was maybe a quarter that size and far more rural than it is now. Immediately to the north is the town of Brook Park, home, today, of Cleveland's Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport, but most importantly for this post, home back then of Brook Park Elementary School, where the bus involved in this accident was bound.

January 22^nd, 1930 was one of those crisp, cold, clear winter mornings, with just a couple of inches of fresh snow on the ground, as a school bus trundled east on Sheldon Road, not too far from both Cleveland's then brand new airport and Berea's New York Central train station. The bus...a Ford Model TT Truck chassis with a wooden body... had just started its run, and there were ten elementary school age kids on board, bundled up against the cold (Again, school bus standard equipment didn't include heaters back in the day). I can just about guarantee that it also had perimeter seating, with the kids sitting with their backs towards the bus sidewalls as well as, very likely, a rear entrance. As kids have been doing on that bus ride to school for countless decades, they were talking and laughing and burning off energy as the bus approached the big Sheldon Road crossing, where the then four track New York Central main line crossed...

Ford Model TT chassied school bus with a wooden, rear entrance body, likely very similar to the bus involved in the accident

Meanwhile two trains had pulled out of Cleveland's then brand new Union Station, minutes apart, at about 8:00 AM. The first, designated Train #7, was a straight passenger train, the second, designated Train #X19, was an express mail train, and was considered an Extra train on the schedule. Being a mail train it also had priority over all other trains on the line. Both trains were running late...only by fifteen minutes or so but still late.

Now, as the Roaring Twenties rolled over into the soon-to-be Desperate Thirties, the railroad was still King, travel-wise. The automobile was already beginning to cut into the railroads' share of travel, and the airlines would be nibbling at their heels in a couple of years, but in 1930 the train was still very much the way to move both goods and people long distances at high speed and would continue to be for at least another decade and a half or so.

 The New York Central main line coming out of Cleveland was a four track main line back then, set up exactly like a four lane highway, with the outer track in each direction being the slow (Or local) track, and the inner track the fast, or express, track. For the first several miles both trains were on the inner, fast track, with Train X19 following about a mile and a half behind train # 7, far enough back that the engineer could keep his eye on the block signals and bring his train to a safe stop if he had to. Then, a couple of miles out of Berea, Train # 7 was diverted to the outer, slow track to allow the mail train to pass it. The crew of Train X-19 got a 'clear board' (Green signal), giving them a clear track. The train's engineer eased the throttle open until they were running about 55 MPH, steadily gaining on train #7 until, as they approached the Sheldon Road crossing, only about a quarter mile separated the two.

Shreve, Ohio Satellite view, with the accident crossing circled in red. The bus destination...Brook Park School...was north and slightly west of the crossing, on a plot of land that's now deeply inside the boundaries of Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport, a corner of which is visible in the upper left of the picture.

Satellite view of the accident crossing today, with bus and train directions of travel and other pertinent information indicated.  There are only three tracks...one of them a siding...today rather than the four track main line that existed in 1930.

 Even though four tracks crossed Sheldon Road, this was still an unprotected crossing. No flagman, no signals, nothing other than the classic cross-buck and the drivers' eyes. Train #7 blew for the crossing, and aboard the bus, driver John Taylor eased to a stop as Train #7 bore down on the crossing, running about 35 or 40MPH, it's locomotive belting smoke and steam skyward and outward, the train dragging a cloud of powdery, just fallen snow behind it. The kids, especially the boys (ALL little boys love trains) were wide eyed as the behemoth thundered past on the far track. By the time the forth or so car had passed, the draft created mini-snow-storm had mingled with clouds of uncondensed steam in the cold morning air to partially hide the train, making seem like a ghostly apparition, even in the bright morning sun.

A quarter mile behind Train #7's observation car and rapidly gaining ground, Train X19's engineer leaned out of Locomotive 3340's cab window and saw the whistle board for Sheldon Road, seemingly drifting in the cloud of snow and steam hanging in train #7's wake. He reached up, flipped the air valve for the bell, then started yanking on the whistle cord, sending the sonorous wail of a steam whistle across the country side.

Train #7's observation car, all but hidden in the clouds of snow and steam being dragged along behind the train, cleared the crossing, the Clank-CLANK of steel wheels hitting rail joints dopplering away as the train receded to the west. Taylor probably glanced to the left to make sure no train was approaching from the opposite direction, then pulled forward, onto the crossing. Now this was a wide crossing...seventy-five feet from where the bus was stopped to the first rail of the fast track Train X19 was on...and Model T's, especially the heavier 'TT' truck chassis, were not known for spirited acceleration. He started rolling at just about the same time Train #7's observation car cleared the crossing, pulling right into the cloud of smoke, steam, and snow hanging in the train's wake, which was effectively hiding everything to the northeast of the crossing, including the onrushing locomotive 3340 at train X19's head end. Train X19 was just about twenty seconds behind Train #7 by the time it neared Sheldon Road. Just about the same length of time it took Taylor to put the bus square across the inner, fast westbound track.

 Street view, approaching the Sheldon Road crossing from the same direction that the bus would have been approaching from on the morning of the accident. Even though Berea has grown exponentially in the eighty-six years since the accident, a trick of fate makes the approach still seem somewhat rural, with only a couple of modern buildings visible in this street view.

Looking towards the Northeast...the same direction that the two trains would have been approaching from...as you approach the crossing. It's a good possibility that the trees lining the track did not exist back in 1930 simply because this was an unguarded crossing. The hazard that grade crossings created for drivers was well recognized by 1930...but apparently not well recognized enough for railroads to spend the money to signalize all of them,or to assign gate guard to them. So they likely did cut trees and shrubs back as much as possible to improve the sight line. Of course, the view from this distance wasn't the issue. HMMM... wonder what the crossing did look like back in 1930?

Using Paintshop Pro, I added a track to give the crossing it's 4-track configuration from 1930, then got rid of the crossing signals and a couple of modern buildings, added some trees, and made a hopefully reasonable facsimile of the crossing in 1930. The crossing was 75 feet wide back then, and all four lines were main line...two west bound and two eastbound, just like a modern four lane highway. The trains would have been on the far two tracks, with Train #7 on the far track.  John Taylor...the bus driver..saw Train #7 approaching the crossing as he approached and stopped, waiting for the train to clear. Now, there was snow on the ground, so the train was making it's own mini-blzzard as it dragged a big cloud of blowing show behind it. On top of that it was cold...this was, after all, Ohio in January...so the steam belching form the locomotive's cylinder exhausts and from the pop-off valves for the car heating systems wasn't condensing as quickly as it would in warm weather, and smoke was tending to hang close to the ground. And Taylor didn't know that Train X-19 was less than half a minute behind Train #7, on the third track over...the inside westbound track.

...The direction the trains were approaching from...again, I used Paintshop to approximate the crossing as it was in 1930. Taylor had a straight, normally unobstructed view up the tracks for a good distance, and, indeed, saw Train #7 approaching on the far track in plenty of time to stop....but after it passed he had all that steam, blowing snow, and smoke hanging close to the ground as Train X-19 approached on the third track over, only about twenty seconds behind Train #7. The problem was, that snow, steam, and smoke hung like a fog bank, completely obscuring the view up the tracks for a good thirty seconds before it dissipated enough to give a driver a view up the tracks, completely obscuring Taylor's view of Train #X-19 as it approached. And, unlike Train #7,  Train X-19 was an unscheduled extra train. While Taylor very likely anticipated Train #7 possibly passing through...it was a daily run...he had no clue that Train X-19 existed at all. And if he did look back up the tracks all he saw was...well...snow and steam. So, wanting to get the kids to school on time, he assumed the way was clear and safe (Who ever heard of trains running in the same direction, twenty seconds apart???) and pulled onto the crossing blind...a good ten seconds too soon.

 Several people...including a mother who lived a bit northeast of the crossing, and who had just put her three kids on the bus and a couple of kids waiting at a bus stop on the other side of the tracks...saw the train, and saw the bus ease to a stop at the crossing to allow Train # 7 to pass, but no one saw the collision. Locomotive 3340 apparently hit the bus just forward of broadside, and the wooden bodied vehicle disintegrated explosively. The chassis was tossed aside the same way you or I would kick an empty cigarette pack off the sidewalk, flipping and tumbling to land upside down next to the right-of-way while everyone aboard the bus was violently ejected, some landing 100 feet from the crossing. With the exception of twelve year old Ethel Davidson, who must have had an angel sitting on either side of her, everyone on board was killed instantly. Ethel suffered a broken leg.

Just about the time Locomotive 3340's engineer, whose last name was Hand, started yanking the whistle cord as he blew for the Sheldon Road crossing, his fireman started shoveling coal into the fiery, seemingly insatiable maw of the firebox to keep steam up so they could make up the fifteen or so lost minutes, so he wasn't looking out of the cab's left-side window as they approached the crossing. The locomotive;'s bulk completely hid everything to the left of the locomotive from Hand, so neither of them saw the bus. All they felt was a sudden quick jerk as the locomotive punted the remains of the bus off of the track, and neither saw the ruined chassis tumble away from the crossing. They were probably looking over at each other with 'The hell was that...' expressions on their faces as the chassis somersaulted away, unseen, one of them likely saying something to the effect of 'All the hell we need! One of the drivers must've thrown a tire!!', oblivious for the moment to the carnage that had just been created.

 Hand, thinking both delay and paperwork, probably cursed under his breath as he pulled the brake handle into the 'service (Normal stop) position, bringing the train to a slow, gentle stop. Train # 7 had also come to a stop...so the mail train could complete it's passing maneuver...and Locomotive 3314 eased to a stop just about opposite the passenger train's observation car. The fireman and engineer both climbed down out of 3314's cab and walked towards the front end of the behemoth they were in command of as smoke drifted from the stack and steam roared from the relief valves. They were looking at the drive wheels, expecting one of the steel tires that the big drivers were shod with to be askew and twisted, but all of them were firmly in place and in good shape. They walked around the front of the engine, at first giving each other puzzled looks, then one of them looked over at the pilot and front platform and his eyes suddenly snapped open wide, becoming saucer eyes as he saw the school books lying, torn and battered, on the platform.

One of Train #7's crew...likely the conductor...had very likely called over to the crew of locomotive 3314, wondering why they'd stopped, probably expecting to hear of a mechanical failure, only to hear something like 'Oh, God, I think we just hit a school bus!' . They ran back towards the crossing, their feet feeling like they weighed in at a ton or so apiece, running up on more debris and books and lunch sacks and shattered sections of the bus body, spotting the chassis now pretzel shaped and upside down to the west of the tracks, and finally running up on bodies. One child...Ethel Davidson...was crying and calling for help.

I found little to nothing about the emergency response on this one, but then again there probably wasn't much (Nor, sadly, was there any need for much). Ethel Davidson was, according to what I found, transported to the hospital in a private car, and the bodies of the deceased were removed to the morgue by both ambulances and private vehicles as local, railroad, and ICC investigators converged on the scene. The superintendent of schools arrived fifteen minutes after the accident...while bus, train, and bodies were all still in place...and got the ball rolling investigation-wise, and as investigators interviewed witnesses and the train crew it became painfully obvious what had happened. Taylor had assumed that, once Train #7 cleared the crossing, that he had a clear, safe road. Problem was, through observation, and actually running a train across the crossing under similar conditions, they figured out that it took a good half a minute for the cloud of steam, smoke, and snow to dissipate enough to allow drivers to actually see whether a train was coming (From either direction)

On top of that, a train was expected from the opposite direction at about the same time the bus stopped at the crossing (It actually passed through shortly after the school superintendent arrived at the scene), and it was surmised that Taylor had looked to the west, watching for that train, just before he started across the tracks. OH...and the superintendent also stated that the train that had hit the bus (Train X19) was obscured in it's own cloud of steam and smoke as it sat on the track. Due to the cold weather, the steam and smoke were just hanging rather than dissipating, basically creating a man-made fog bank. Add the fact that Train #7 was usually all by it's lonesome...remember, Train X19 was an extra train that had been added to the schedule...as well as the fact that there were no signals, watchmen or anything else to protect motorists and pedestrians and you end up with just about a perfect recipe for disaster.

Taylor was another driver who was known to be a very safe, conscientious, and careful driver. He followed guidelines and policies to a 'T', and obviously stopped at the Sheldon Road crossing to let the first train...Train #7...pass. Problem was, he didn't take it quite far enough. If he had waited only half a minute or so...thirty seconds...longer, he'd have seen Train X19 bearing down on the crossing. But he didn't wait. And paid for it with his life, sadly, taking nine children with him.

**************************************************************************************

The children who lost their lives that morning:

Vernon Davidson
 William Davidson

Jacob Walters
 Juanita Walters

Evelyn Kaltenbach 
William Pastorek

Dorothy Zielinski
 Rita Zielinski
 Vincent Zielinski

I believe that the two Davidson boys were the brothers

of Ethel Davidson, the girl who was injured in the crash.

They lived within sight of the crossing, and their mom had

watched them get on the bus just minutes before the accident.

*******************************************************************************************

<***> Notes, Links, and Stuff<***>

The other posts in this series

in the order they were posted.

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/evans-colorado-bustrain-crash.html  Evans, Colo December 1961

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/spring-city-tenn-bustrain-crash.html  Spring City Tenn. August 1955

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/congers-new-york-bustrain-crash.html  Congers New York  

March 1972

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/lake-station-indiana-church-bustrain.html Lake Station Indiana

October 1971

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/stratton-nebraska-church-bustrain-crash.html  Stratton Nebraska 

August 1976

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/fox-river-grove-illinois-bustrain-crash.htm Fox River Grove Illinois October 1995

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/conasauga-tennesee-bustrain-crash.html  Conasauga Tenn.  March 2000

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2016/03/sandy-utah-bus-train-crashthe-worst.html   Sandy, Utah Dec 1938

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2016/03/proberta-california-train-bus-crash.html  Proberta, California Nov 1921

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2016/02/shreve-ohio-and-berea-ohio-school.html  Shreve and Berea Ohio Jan. 1930

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2016/03/crescent-city-florida-trainschool-bus.html  Crescent City, Florida December 1933

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2016/03/rockville-md-train-bus-crash-april-11th.html  Rockville, Maryland April 1935

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2016/03/mason-city-iowa-bus-train-crash.html  MAson City, Iowa Oct. 1937

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2016/03/eads-tennessee-trainschool-bus-crash.html Eads, Tennessee Oct. 1941

<***>

As you head back in time and look for information about accidents, disasters, and incidents of all kinds, you can be surprised by what you find, and more so, sometimes, about what you can't find. Accidents that I just absolutely knew would be a breeze to find details about were as barren, info-wise, as the Sahara desert's barren, pretty-much-everything-wise. Then an incident that's far less severe and/or well known will have so much information available that I have to pick, choose, and filter.

Sometimes I'll get really lucky with both the well known and more obscure incidents and get hold of one of the official government reports, which happens far less frequently and becomes exponentially less likely the further back you go, but when it does happen, it's always a welcome surprise, especially when said incident's era is approaching the Century-Ago mark.

With that being said, when I started 'Part two' of this series of posts, I knew that getting info on the incidents was going to be a hit-or-miss affair, and this post is a grade-A example of just that. I found the ICC report for the Berea Ohio accident, but the only thing I could find on the Shreve, Ohio accident other than a couple of articles on the genealogy site that I mine for subjects for this blog was an archived newspaper article. At least the only thing that wouldn't cost me seventy-five bucks that I don't have right at the moment. That seventy-five bucks, BTW, would have given me access to multiple newspaper archives...always an interesting read, but then, as now, the media's accuracy is sometimes very much at question. OK, make that often very much at question, considering the fact that the Berea ICC report refuted much of the info in the news articles I found about that accident.  As always, though, the research was half the fun.

Of course the best kind of research is getting to talk to someone who's local to the area where the incident occurred and is knowledgeable about both the incident and the area. I again got lucky in this respect when I called the Berea School District offices to find the location of old Brook Park Elementary, and got put in touch with a very knowledgeable and pleasant lady by the name of Nancy Braford, who I spent a very pleasant half hour or so talking with as she told me all kinds of facts about both the incident and the area...I'm ever grateful to her for taking time out of her busy day and talking to me. It was truly the highlight of my morning.

She also put me in touch with Nancy Gilliham at the County Line Historical Society, who I'd like to extend a heartfelt thanks to for sending me the Fall, 1998 issue of The Enterprise, that organization's quarterly newsletter, which contained a reproduction of the article written by Grace Dosa as a teen.

I still had to do a lot of speculating on both of the incidents in this post, though, but, as always, I hope I managed to make them interesting, as accurate as possible, and fun to read.

Now, on the the notes!

Shreve, Ohio Notes

One interesting fact about the Shreve accident that bears repeating is that the crossing was a signal-protected crossing with, at he very least, a bell and very possibly a flashing light though there was some doubt that the light was operating. As noted in the body of the article, this would not have been an alternating light signal like the ones in use today but was probably a single flashing red light mounted above the cross-buck.

This accident also makes it clear that distracted driving is not a new hazard, as Joe Baker was facing a multitude of distractions that night, all of which combined to put him in front of an oncoming train. This is why the laws that were ultimately passed nation-wide have the driver not only stop, Look, and listen, but silence everything capable of making noise when they do so. Of course it took a couple of decades for this to happen.

Berea, Ohio Notes

There is absolutely no worse nightmare for a parent than loosing a child, and the nightmare gets even worse when a single family looses multiple children at once, but this has happened regularly in incidents of all kinds involving children. Seven of the children who died in the accident were from just three families. The Davidson family lost two sons, the Walters Family lost a son and a daughter, and the Zehnski family lost two daughters and a son in the accident, ripping open a void in their parents' hearts that would never be completely healed.

<***>

The Berea accident has a very important and very touching similarity with the Evans, Colorado bus crash...like the kids who died in the Evans crash, the kids who lost their lives in the Berea bus crash were memorialized by having a school named after them.

Brook Park Memorial Elementary School was built and opened in 1956 as a tribute to the children who died in the accident, and to this day a memorial ceremony is held on, or as close to as possible, January 22^nd at the school to remember them. A memorial garden at the school also also memorializes the victims of the accident. 

The school was one of several built in response to a huge surge in school population caused by both the post-war baby boom, and the construction of a Ford Motor Company assembly plant at Brook Park, and the property that the school, at 16900 Holland Road in Brook Park, sits on was purchased from the Walter Family, who lost two children in the accident. It was at their request that the school was named Brook Park Memorial in memory of the children who were killed in the crash.

A winter-time view of Brook Park Memorial Elementary School. The land the school was built on land puchased from the parents of Jacob and Juanita Walters, two of the children who died in the crash...it was at The Walters' request that the shool was named in honor of the children who died in the crash.

 

<***>

A little girl named Grace Dossa was born in 1928, making her just two years old when the accident happened. The accident killed several children in her neighborhood. and she heard stories about it as she grew up, and being both a very inquisitive and very intelligent child, she developed an interest in the history behind the accident, as well as the history of her community. This interest became a very fortunate turn of events for the citizens of Brook Park, especially the kids who attend Brook Park Memorial. As a teenager she wrote an article about the accident for the local paper, and then, for nearly five decades she visited Brook Park Memorial Elementary on the anniversary of the accident, giving a talk on the accident as well as what going to school was like back in the Thirties and Forties. She lived in Brooke Park for all of her life, and passed away only a few years ago.

<***>

Old Brook Park Elementary School...the bus' destination that long ago morning...was a beautiful old two story brick school building with English basement (Actually making it three stories) built in 1917 and located at Five Points Road and Riverside Drive, an intersection that, according to Google Maps, no longer exists. The plot of land where the school...long gone now...once stood is now on airport property.

<***>

With a very few exceptions, school districts in 1930 didn't own their own buses...they posted contracts yearly for drivers to bid on, and the drivers and sometimes transit companies who won the contracts actually owned the buses. John Taylor had first bid on and won the contract for that particular route in 1927, then won the contract yearly. I'm going to make an assumption about his bus here, and say it was probably bought new the year he got the contract, making it a '26 or '27, though the distinction wouldn't have been that great, it being a Ford Model TT, the truck version of the venerable and legendary Model T Ford, which changed very little, generally speaking, from one year to the next.

<***>

Hard as it is to believe, school buses originally weren't yellow, but were, rather, whatever color the owners wanted to have them painted. One of the stories that came out of this accident is that the State of Ohio started requiring school buses to be painted that now famous School Bus Yellow as a result of this accident. If this was true, they were way ahead of the game, as yellow didn't become a standard color for school buses until the mid-Thirties, and the color we all know as 'School Bus Yellow' wasn't actually developed until 1939.

<***>

This was a major multiple track crossing that at the time saw as many as 130 trains a day...that's five an hour, or roughly one every twelve minutes or so...yet there was no protection of any kind for motorists and pedestrians. This accident was one of the major factors in a huge push to have all crossings equipped with active warning signals...lights and bells. Though huge strides were made over the next decade or so...especially in Ohio...it was a long, uphill battle, one that still hasn't been won entirely, especially out in the Plains States, and in very rural areas not only in the Mid-west, but throughout the country.

Granted I can't think of any unprotected crossings not on private property in the area where I live, but that hasn't always been the case. One of the very first fatal accidents I responded to was at an unprotected crossing, where a car was hit by the Auto-train, and this was in 1974, forty-four years after the Berea, Ohio accident. Also, that particular accident wasn't in a rural area, but in a fast growing suburb of Richmond Va., so yep, unprotected crossings were still a problem throughout the country for decades after the Berea accident.

And, while things have improved astronomically since that cold, tragic day in 1930, to this day, you'll still occasionally run up on an unprotected crossing, usually on a little traveled back road in a very rural portion of the country.

Sandy Utah Bus-train crash...The Worst Crossing accident in U.S.History

Sandy, Utah Train/Bus Crash

Dec 1^st, 1938

Sadly, through some combination of ignorance, over-confidence, apathy, negligence, or plain long stupidity, school bus drivers have been driving their buses into the path of oncoming trains since before motorized buses were even thought of, back when 'school buses' were actually horse drawn rigs called Kid Hacks. The very first recorded school bus-train crash occurred near Congers, New York in February of 1902 when one of those horse drawn 'Kid Hacks', bringing a group of high school kids back from a basketball game, was struck by a train after it somehow managed to get caught between manual crossing gates. That first train-school bus crash killed eight kids, two of them sisters. It wouldn't be an isolated event...in the 113 years since, there have been 166 more school bus-train collisions. Thirty-five of them have been fatal.  Students were injured in the great majority of the non-fatal accidents, and many of those injuries were life-changing for the victims.

While that only comes out to about 1.4 such crashes per year you have to remember that we've had stretches of a decade or so without a train-school bus collision recently (The last one before this past January's double fatality accident in North Dakota occurred in 2000) as well as shorter stretches of 2-5 years between crashes here and there. Some years...and decades...though, were really bad, and the Thirties were among the worst of them, with seven recorded multiple fatality bus-train collisions. There's a reason that these always catastrophic accidents were far more common three quarters of a century and more ago that they are now.

That reason? Eighty years ago the great majority of railroad crossings were unprotected, and the law didn't require school bus drivers to stop and actively look and listen for an oncoming train when they rolled up on one. It took, very literally, decades for the law to catch up with technology and both add warning signals to most crossings and mandate that school bus drivers actually stop their vehicles at all crossings, absolutely ensuring that there was no train coming before they even considered moving again.  I know, common sense should tell..hell, demand...that the driver of a bus load of children to do just that. Sadly, common sense isn't so...well...common, and laws often do have to be passed to inspire people to do what should be a no-brainer. With that in mind, while doing the research for these posts it took just about along enough time to drink a cup of coffee for me to realize that one historian or the other credits just about every major bus-train collision from about 1935 on for being the accident that got the ball rolling to get those very laws written, passed, and put in place.

Trust me when I say that sorting that one out hasn't exactly been easy to track down, and to be honest I really haven't even tried to narrow it down to 'The' accident. At this point, in fact, I'm not sure that'd even be possible. And with that thought in mind, the accident in Spring City, Tennessee, in August 1955 does present some pretty convincing evidence that it's the one that finally got laws requiring drivers to stop at railroad crossings and actively look and listen for a train put in place in all fifty states. 

Thing is, there's another accident that some historians claim did the exact same thing almost two decades earlier, in 1938. Oh...and that one still holds the very dubious distinction of being the worst railroad crossing accident in U.S. History.

We're going to roll time back to Thursday Dec 1^st, 1938 and head for Sandy Utah, just south of Salt Lake City. Utah is a fascinating state in it's own right. It's the only state in the union where the majority of the residents belong to the same church...most are Mormon...and is home to the Bonneville Salt Flats, one of the Meccas of all car-freaks (Myself included). For fans of early Seventies bubble-gum Pop and music history-philes, Utah is where a guy named Donny Osmond grew up and got his start (Along with his brothers, and his sis Marie).

The state's greatest claim to fame, of course, is the Great Salt Lake...that strangest and saltiest of all of the inland lakes in the U.S. The great majority of Utah's population is packed into an 120 mile long, 40 or so mile wide swath of continuous and all but interconnecting urban and suburban life hard by and to the south of the Great Salt Lake's eastern shore. Back in 1938 that same strip of ground still played host to most of the state's then much smaller population, but the population density was dozens of times lower. Sandy...now home to just shy of 100 K Utahans...had fewer than 1500 residents and Jordan High School...now one of four high schools in Sandy and host to 2300 or so students...only had an enrollment of about four hundred. 

Thirty-eight of those four hundred or so students braved a Utah snowstorm to climb aboard a JHS-bound school bus on that cold, snowy Thursday morning exactly a week after Thanksgiving '38 for what should have been the usual forty-five or so minute ride to school. The bus...a fifty-four passenger 1935 GMC/Superior ...was under the command of 29 year old Farrold Silcox. This, remember, was long before kids got 'Snow Days' when the white stuff was falling, and when Silcox looked out of the kitchen window as he downed a cup of coffee and saw the moderate to light snow falling, he decided he should go ahead and start his bus route. He told his wife just that, and headed out.

Contrary to popular belief (And even news reports of the day) a howling blizzard was not in progress. While it was snowing pretty good as Silcox started his route and the weather south of them was far nastier that it was in Sandy, the Salt lake City-Sandy area was on the edge of the storm, so they missed the worst of it. It was still nasty enough, though, in that 'Aw crap it's freaking snowing' kind of way, so Silcox pulled out of his driveway a good half hour early and several of the kids on Silcox's route would miss the bus because he was early. Remember, this was farm country back then...sugar beet farms to be exact, the area being one of the nation's primary producers of that crop...so a slew of the kids were already up, awake, and in the middle of doing their chores when the bus rolled up an hour or so early. Not only does snow not stop chores from getting done, it often adds to them.  Those chores had to be finished. This was (And still often is) a major part of a farm kid's life. With the kids in the middle of said chores, and therefore not anywhere within hailing distance of 'ready for school', their moms had no choice but to wave the bus on.

The kids that did make the bus climbed on board and greeted Silocx as they did every morning, and as also happened every morning, the kids who were were JHS band members (Several of whom had performed in a concert the night before) piled their instruments up next to the drivers seat. Silcox didn't allow horse-play, shenanigans, loud conversation, or instrument playing, be it good or bad, on his bus at all. These preparations taken care of, the kids moved quietly to their seats and settled in for a cold ride to school.

 Though the bus, like modern buses, was all steel and looked like an early version of what we picture when we think 'school bus' today...right down to the yellow paint...the seats the kids moved to were not laid out the way they are on modern buses. Instead of the double row of seats separated by a center aisle that we're used to today and has been standard since at least the early 40s, there was a single row of double seats running down the center of the bus...straddling the area that would be the aisle in a conventionally laid out bus...while two more rows of seats lined the sidewalls of the ride, with the kids sitting with their backs against the sidewall of the bus...a throw back to the old 'Kid Hacks' and the very earliest motorized school buses.

A page from a 1935 Superior Body school bus brochure. Though this is on a Dodge Chassis rather than a GMC...or back then, General Motors Truck...chassis, the layout's pretty much identical to that of the bus involved in the accident. I love the 'Boy-proof rear emergency door latching mechanism'.   While this was actually a pretty  well built bus body for that era, with all steel construction including the frame, there's absolutely no way it (Or anything else) would stand up to a direct hit by a train.

  There were seats for fifty-four passengers in the bus body's twenty or so foot length and eight foot width (The bus was just over twenty-eight feet long over-all).  It had a GMC straight six, four speed tranny, hydraulic brakes and...remember me saying they settled in for a cold ride a paragraph or two back?...no heater. As far as the kids were concerned, that one was a biggie. Though they probably didn't give a rip about the bus' mechanical features and options, they were more than aware of the lack of a heater, it being the first day of December during a pretty decent snowstorm, and all of them were probably bundled up like Eskimos as the bus trundled along what was then a back county road paralleling the Denver and Rio Grande Western tracks, not all that far from their final destination of Jordan High School. 

The destination never reached...Old Jordan High School.  The school was in use until the late 90s.  When it was torn down, the front entrance facade was preserved and used as the main entrance to a multi-screen theater complex. Picture courtesy of KSL TV News

There wasn't any horse-play or loud talking going on...remember, Silcox ran a tight ship...so the thirty-nine kids on board that morning were talking quietly. I have a feeling the snow and Christmas may have been major topics of conversation, along with basketball, December being, then as now, smack dab in the middle of high school hoops season. A few were, as every kid who ever rode the bus has done occasionally, hustling to finish up assignments before the bus swung into the JHS driveway. A pretty 17 year old Senior named Naomi Lewis had knocked out a pretty intense poem the night before, presumably for English class. She'd never get to turn it in. Fifteen year old Virginia Nelson closed her English book, having just finished up the last of a couple of verb problems, and sat back to relax and probably chat with her friends for a few minutes, her now finished homework peeking out from the pages of the textbook. Her homework wouldn't get turned in either.

The bus was nearing a wide spot in the road known as Burgon's Crossing as it rolled along the narrow, oil and gravel paved road that paralleled the Denver and Rio Grande tracks. The road 'switched sides' here... making a near 90 degree turn to the right and climbing a slight grade to cross the single track at an unsignaled crossing, then dropping back down and heaving itself 90 degrees to the left to parallel the tracks to their east rather than west. The kids barely took notice as they felt the bus slow and swing ponderously into the turn...they rode this route every morning, so it's a good bet that the only notice they took of it was as a land mark, as in 'X number of minutes before we get to school'. A couple of the kids in the seats that backed up to the right sidewall of the bus may have glanced back over their shoulder only to realize for the umteenth or so time that the windows were completely fogged over.. A couple of them, though, thought they heard something...

*

The weather...in the form of what the weather gurus today would call a 'Major Snow Event'...not only caused Silcox to start his route early, it, was playing absolute havoc with the D&RGW's train schedules. Denver and Rio Grande Freight # 31, known as 'The Flying Ute', pulled out of Helper, Utah, just over 100 miles south of Sandy, at just past 3:30 AM, already almost three hours late. D&RGW Locomotive # 3708...a big, articulated 4-6-6-4 Challenger class freight engine...wasn't even breaking a sweat as it dragged fifty freight cars, thirty-eight of them empty, out of Helper, but the snow storm...near a full blizzard in Helper when Engineer E.L.Rehmer yanked on the whistle lanyard, released the brakes, and pushed the overhead mounted throttle around it's quadrant...slowed them even further. Had the weather been clear they would have rumbled through Provo, twenty seven miles and change from Burgon's Crossing, at just about the time they actually pulled out of Helper but instead they rolled through at 7:54 AM. 

The storm was easing quickly by then, though, watery gray daylight replacing eerie, snow cocooned night-darkness, and, with a half mile or so of visibility ahead of them, Rehmer eased the throttle open, slowly bringing the train up to 52 miles per hour...actually two miles per hour faster then the speed limit in that section of line, and the speed they were making as they passed the whistle board for Burgon's Crossing. On the right side of the big steamer's cab, Rehmer reached up left handed, grabbed the whistle lanyard and tugged it, blasting the steamers whistle in the long-short-long-long crossing warning.

Most accounts of the of the accident would have you believe that a full-scale, wind-howling, snow-slinging, white-out inducing blizzard was still lashing Sandy at just after 8:30 that morning, but according to the ICC reports and a couple of dozen witnesses, they were just on the edge of the storm, which was actually leaving Sandy behind as Train #31 pounded towards Burgon's Crossing. In fact, according to statements made by the train crew, no more than a light, fine snow was falling,  Both fireman Al Elton, in 3708's cab, and the train's conductor, who was ensconced in the caboose, nearly a half mile behind the locomotive, confirmed this when, during the investigation, they stated they could see the entire length of the train as they approached the crossing. So, according to them, while visibility definitely wasn't sunny-spring-day clear you could still see a good half mile up the track. Of course, you've got to remember something about steam locomotives...

...and that's the fact that the crew, basically, had almost no forward visibility. In fact, forward visibility pretty much sucked, especially in a big articulated freight engine like #3708. The engineer sat on the right side of the cab  the fireman on the left and while the cab did have very small front windows...really more like slits than windows...high in the upper front corners of the cab, all they really provided was a look down the side of the sixty or so foot length of the boiler with absolutely no view of the track directly ahead of them. Through these same tiny windows they had only a very, very limited angle of view to the left or right...so limited that it was virtually useless. 

One of the D&RGW's big 3700 series 4-6-6-4 Challengers. Locomotive 3708...the locomotive that struck the bus in Sandy...was essentially identical.  This also illustrates just how little forward visibility the crew of a steam locomotive had. The boilers on the Challengers were 60' long, blocking any view ahead or to the opposite side of the track from the engineer's or fireman's seating position. This is why you always saw the engineer and fireman on steam locomotives leaning out of the cab's side 'Picture' window, no matter what the weather...they had to do this in order to see ahead of them.

 This is why, generally, back in the age of steam, you always saw the engineer and fireman (When he wasn't tending the fire that kept the behemoth moving) leaning out of the cab window to see what was ahead of them.. They could lean out of the cab's side 'picture' windows and see what was ahead of them, but they had to work as a team to do so. See there was another problem. The engineer and fireman had no view what-so-ever of what was happening on the opposite side of the right of way from where they were sitting. Again, that sixty foot long boiler blocked the view of the opposite side of the right-of-way. 

So, having absolutely no view of what was going on on the left side of the locomotive, the engineer had to depend on the fireman to spot, identify, and advise him about any hazards on the left in time for him to react. The engineers reaction to an emergency on a train is pretty much limited to 'Stand On The Brakes and Pray You Can Get Stopped', so the fireman has to identify said hazard and let the engineer know he had a problem at least a half mile or so before they reached it. And sadly, that wasn't always possible...especially if the hazard was only a couple of hundred yards away when it became a hazard. And this is exactly what happened in Sandy that morning.

 Elton was leaning out of the left side cab window, peering ahead as they roared towards the crossing, Rehmer yanking on the whistle cord, sending the shrill, melodic cry that was a steam locomotive whistle shrilling through the country-side. One of them reached up and turned an air valve that started the locomotive's air powered bell clanging. Elton saw a yellow school bus, several hundred yards ahead of them, lumber around the curve at Burgon's crossing and ease to a stop about 25 feet from the tracks...it looked like the bus was going to stay put, but he kept his eyes on it anyway...

A map of the school bus route from the Salt Lake City Tribune, Dec 2, 1938.  As can be seen from the modern satellite view below, with the exception of State Street, none of the named streets exist now (I even confirmed this by searching on Google Maps). Seventy-seven years of population growth has changed the street layout drastically, and the numbered streets have been renumbered, making it a bit of a task to even actually find the site of the accident crossing, which was still in use until 2002. I circled it in red, as well as indicating it with a couple of arrows. The building circled in red in the upper right of the modern view (Below) is the Jordan Commons multiplex theater complex, on the former site of old Jordan High School...they were with-in minutes of making it to school when they got hit.

Modern Satellite view of the Sandy, Utah area, with the site of the accident crossing indicated bottom center with a red circle and arrows. The former site of Jordan High School...now a multi-screen theater complex...is red-circled in the upper right of the view. Satellite view courtesy Google Maps

The kids didn't give it a second thought as the bus eased to a stop, simply continuing their studying or talking and paying little or no attention to what was going on up front, so there's no real agreement as to whether Silcox opened the bus door to give himself a better view up the tracks, or if he even looked up and down the tracks at all. And it's not like he had no visibility, BTW. All of the side windows were fogged and/or frosted over but, while the bus didn't have a heater it did have what was called a 'frost window' or 'Clear Vision Window' on both sides of the windshield as well as the drivers side window (Though that window, didn't factor into the accident as the train was approaching from the right.).

These frost windows were separate, rectangular heater-boxes attached to the inside of the windshield or window. They used the exact same theory as present day rear window defrosters, but were far, far cruder in design. Though bulky and crude, they were actually pretty effective.

 Frost wasn't the only thing compromising Silcox's view of the outside world, though... The body of the buses of that vintage narrowed at the cowl, so the door was actually at an angle, the door opening itself was narrower, and the door-windows were smaller than those on modern buses.  This meant that  if Silcox didn't open the door, he didn't have much of a view to his right...the direction that Train #31 was bearing down on them from...at all. 

The area of the crossing today...the crossing was removed in 2002. While seventy-seven years worth of growth and progress have changed the area drastically, I was able to narrow down the crossing, and I think a short stretch of the roadbed of the original road that paralleled the west side of the tracks is still faintly visible. The paths of bus and train are indicated on the satellite view, with the bus' intended direction of turn indicated as well. Silcox actually did stop, but failed to see or hear the train.

We'll never know for sure whether or not he opened the door, looked, or just said a couple of Hail Marys and popped the clutch, but what is known...all too well...is that a few seconds after he stopped, Silcox down-shifted, eased the clutch out and pulled forward, onto the tracks. And, in an eerie precursor to the Evans,Colorado crash twenty-three years later, one of the kids at the front of the bus glanced to the right, saw the front end of Locomotive 3708 bearing down on them and, at the instant before the world exploded around them, screamed...

…Train!!!!!!!

*

Elton, leaning out of the 'picture'; window on the left side of 3708's cab, very likely went pale and bug-eyed, letting go a curse as he saw the bus tires begin to roll. He turned his head as he saw the bus moving forward, yelling 'Big-hole Her!!!!'...Railroad speak for 'Emergency Brakes Now!!!!'...across the cab even as the front bumper of the bus crossed the first rail. Rehmer who'd been stemming D&RGW freight locomotives for years, slammed the throttle closed and grasped the air-brake lever, yanking it all the way back into emergency even as Elton's warning echoed through the cab. The bus was maybe 200 feet ahead of them as the brakes dumped, grabbed, and the wheels locked and started singing the steel on steel scream that's preceded so many tragedies, but they probably hadn't even slowed down before the pilot (What children from time-eternal have called the 'cow-catcher) of the big 4-6-6-4 bit into the right side of the bus just about broad side with a cataclysmic 'Crwump!!!
 

The one boy's shouted warning came at almost the same instant the bus blew apart in a deadly burst of flying metal, glass, seats, books...and kids. The right side of the bus wrapped itself around the front platform of the big steamer like a sheet wrapping up a mummy as it tore away from the rest of the body with a quick but tortured scree of ripping metal. The rest of the body ripped loose from the chassis and tumbled like a hard-kicked tin can for 101 feet before landing up-right, leaving a trail of coats, books homework, lunches, seats, and injured kids as it tumbled, looking like a bomb had gone off inside of it when it landed hard by the tracks. Most of the kids were violently ripped from their seats as the bus came apart explosively, several of them landing on the track ahead of the onrushing steel behemoth that had just slammed in to them. A couple of them were ejected through the right side windows to land on the pilot and front platform of the locomotive. Everyone was ejected and twenty-three of the kids on board the bus, along with Silcox, were killed instantly as the train ripped it apart. Two more, horribly injured, would die with-in the next couple of days. 

<********> 

The front and right side of the bus body as well as the chassis wrapped around the front of D&RGW locomotive 3708. Look behind the man in the dark hat at the extreme right of the shot, and you can see one of the bus' center seats, still mounted on the chassis. Cutting torches had to be utilized to separate bus and train.  Also you can see just how big these locomotives were here...they were huge. This is the class of big that the term 'Ginormous' was coined to describe...it's amazing that anyone survived this accident. Screencap courtesy of KSL-TV, Salt Lake City, Utah

Another view...this one, sadly, low quality...of the front of the bus wrapped around the front end of the locomotive. The still-mounted center seat is easily seen here, and it looks like one of the perimeter seats may be just visible  just ahead if it, behind the front portion of the roof. A couple of bodies actually ended up between the bus body and the front of the locomotive, on the locomotive's front platform and pilot...they were likely ejected through the right side windows of the bus.

The rear and left side of he bus body, which tumbled just over 100 feet from the crossing after being torn away from the chassis.. The entire right side of the bus body was torn away the way you'd rip the side off of a cardboard box.  Note one of the perimeter seats, still in place beneath the next to last full size window, and two of the center seats visible in the wreckage...one just in front of the perimeter seat, and a second (And possibly a third) visible in front of the open rear emergency door.

It's also possible that the rear half of the bus had been rolled upright in this pic...I found a very short YouTube vid of some news reel footage (Posted the link in 'Links') and the rear half of the bus was lying on it's side in the video.

This pic appeared in the Salt Lake City Tribune the day after the accident, and very clearly illustrates the layout of the road and crossing as well as the path of the bus. The train was northbound. The rear portion of the bus body is visible, circled, in the upper left middle of the pic. Again, it's notable that Silcox did indeed stop, but didn't take enough care to ensure there was no train before he proceeded across the tracks.

  The train slid about a half mile before shuddering to s stop, but still actually got stopped before it completely cleared the crossing...note that there are railroad cars on both sides of the crossing as the train was 'cut' to allow access from both sides of the tracks.  Given that 3708 couldn't be moved for a couple of hours after the crash...until the bus chassis was moved..., a second locomotive had to have been dispatched to both move the rear half of the train, and to continue 3708's run.

Also note how little snow was on the ground...one of several factors that handily refuted the 'Train was obscured by snow' theory. One thing that, to me, is also instantly notable. This was well into the incident, given the number of people on scene and the fact that the media had arrived...but there's not a single piece of emergency equipment visible anywhere.

<********>

 Even as the train punted the body like a football the locomotive's pilot over-rode the bus' frame rails and dragged the chassis and right side of the bus over a half mile. The bus' right side frame rail bent like cooked spaghetti as the chassis crammed itself beneath the pilot and slammed into the  locomotive's front...or pilot...truck, derailing it, the derailed wheels tearing up ties, scattering ballast like shrapnel, and digging up the roadbed until 3708 finally shuddered to a stop 2300 feet and change from the crossing, scattering bus-parts, including the entire front clip and drive-train, alongside the right-of-way. 


No one got out of this one uninjured, and the injuries, in many cases, were life-changing. I'm not sure where the first phone call reporting the accident came from...this was 1938, remember, and while the telephone was becoming more and more main-stream, only just more than  thirty percent of homes had phones. A young lady named June Winn was waiting for the bus on her front porch about a quarter mile north of the crossing, as kids have done during bad weather since time eternal. This was open country back then, remember, so she could see the crossing from her porch, and she also saw the train coming, and saw the bus ease to a stop. Knowing she had just a couple of minutes...however long it took the train to pass and the bus to cross the tracks and make it the quarter mile or so to her house...she gathered her books and started walking towards the end of her driveway, just in time to hear the 'CR-WUUMMP!! of the crash, and looked up to see the dismembered chassis being shoved down the track ahead of the train. (That absolutely had to be one of the most traumatic 'This can't really be happening' moments of all time.). 

June ran back to the house, dropping her books and screaming for her parents, and if the Winns had a phone I'd lay odds that they made the first call and if that was the case, the train could have very well still been sliding when one of the Winns picked the phone up and desperately rang for the operator.  But I've also found one source that stated that someone had to run for over a mile to find a phone, and no matter how quick that call was made, this was 1938, and prehospital care, especially for the type of injuries suffered in this accident, just plain long didn't exist at all. 

Meanwhile, as tragedy played out only a couple of miles away, seventeen year old Wanda Shields stood just inside the front entrance of Jordan High School, watching the buses roll in, specifically for the bus her BFF rode...the bus she would  have ridden if her little sis hadn't gotten sick the day before, causing Wanda's mom to nix a planned-for sleepover with her BFF because she needed Wanda at home.

Her bestie never arrived. It was still spitting snow as the first bell rang, and Wanda drifted off to her first period class, where she found her first period teacher and several students crying...one of the girls looked at her, teary eyed and said 'Oh my God, Wanda...' Before this un-named girl could finish the thought the bell rang three or so times...the coded signal back in those pre-P.A. system days for all students to assemble in the Auditorium.  This assembly was where Wanda, and the rest of the student body found out about the crash. The principal told them that there had been a 'Horrible crash', but gave few other details, as only dribs and drabs of information had made it back to the school. He then told the kids that school was canceled for the day, and parents were called and buses recalled to pick the kids up. 

Wanda didn't know for sure that it was her best friend's bus involved in the accident...but she had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that was telling her that it was. This memory...recounted by Wanda when she was interviewed as the accident's 75th anniversary approached...was one of the very few references I found of any kind to emergency response to the crash.

We have to remember that this was a very rural area back in 1938, and that the U.S was still in the midst of The Great Depression, though it was beginning to ease...very slightly...by the end of the decade.  Fire departments in that area, other than Salt Lake City's, were all volunteer if they existed at all. Equipment would have been equally limited... downright primitive by today's standards...as very few Volunteer F.D.s could afford new rigs during the depression. Heavy rescue equipment consisted of railroad jacks and acetylene torches and, for the most part, was only carried by specialized rigs in the largest cities. 

  There were few phones, no radios, and notification of volunteers, where they did exist relied on the age-old 'House Siren' perched on a pole next to the fire house. But to to be very honest here, I have a feeling that there was no fire department to respond in Sandy, Utah, or anywhere closer than Salt Lake City or Midvale on that tragic December first eighty years ago. South Jordan...smaller than and hard by Sandy to the West...didn't get anything vaguely resembling fire protection until 1951, and it's telling that in the accident scene pics I've been able to find there's not a single firefighter or emergency vehicle visible anywhere...just lots of private vehicles and guys in suits.

The great majority of ambulances back then were operated by either hospitals or funeral homes and the closest ones to the scene were probably in Salt Lake City (which even back then was a teeming city of 140K residents), and Midvale, which, with just shy of 3000 residents, was one of the largest towns in the area. Ambulances were requested from throughout the region and twelve responded to the scene. Back in 1938, though, prehosital 'Patient Care' was focused on getting the patient to the hospital quickly, and very little was done in the field, so no matter how many ambos responded or where they were responding from, it would be a very basic 'Swoop and Scoop' operation once they got there.  The thirteen...out of 38...kids who survived were put on stretchers, loaded into onto one of the ambulances, and the drivers floor-boarded the big Caddies or Packards to get them to the hospital while the patient were still breathing and viable. From the period news reports I read six or eight of these kids were extremely lucky...they were treated for their injuries and released (I'm betting they were seated at the very rear, on the left side of the bus).

This was a nasty, nasty crash...At least seven of the survivors suffered critical injuries, and two of them would die before the next couple of days passed. Twenty-three died at the scene, and  many of the bodies were so badly mangled that not only did parents have trouble identifying their children, officials on scene had trouble determining just how many kids had been on the bus and who had been killed. Remember me saying just above that info was slow to arrive at JHS? They weren't even sure who was aboard the bus, and for a short while, just which bus it was. 

Once they were sure which bus was involved in the crash, figuring out just who was on the bus wasn't easy...remember, the technology we take for granted today hadn't even been thought of in 1938. The first thought that comes to mind is 'See what students aren't at school'...but such a head count at the school wouldn't necessarily be accurate because a student could be absent for any number of reasons...several of the kids who should have been on Silcox's bus, remember, missed it. Volunteers ultimately had to canvas door-to-door along Silcox's bus' route to determine who had and hadn't been aboard...and who hadn't returned home from school. And the information they tallied in that grim census was heartbreaking. As happened in Evans two decades and change later, several families lost multiple children, three families loosing two children apiece. And, also as happened at Evans, several sets of cousins were among those killed in the crash, meaning some parents lost not only a son or daughter, but a niece or nephew as well.

Of course, as parents found out about the crash, those who could descended upon the scene to search for their kids. There was absolutely no perimeter control at scenes back then...at least not as strict as it is today... and parents pretty much had the run of the scene. They either had the horrible, horrible experience of finding their childrens' bodies on the scene (Words don't even exist to describe the horror of that experience) or had to embark on that frustrating, heartbreaking search for the hospital or morgue that their child was transported to. (This lack of information available for parents or other relatives about the status of their loved ones who were involved in a major mass casualty incident...MCI in modern terminology...is a problem that hasn't been completely solved to this day). 

The investigations started immediately, of course, with one of the first investigators to arrive on the scene being Lote Kinney, who was special investigator for the Salt Lake County Attorney, and he was also one of the first to confirm that visibility wasn't overly obscured by the weather. He got to the scene about 9:15AM...just under 45 minutes after the accident...and could see a good half mile up the track in both directions. Being a sharp and intuitive investigator, one of the first questions he asked was 'Is this about what the weather was like when the accident happened?' The answer was yes. So it was pretty obvious that, had Silcox looked...I mean really looked...he should have seen Train #31 bearing down on the crossing.

Kinney didn't even have to ask about road conditions, which he knew would be questioned. He wasn't notified until at least fifteen minutes after the the accident, then had to drive to the scene from Salt Lake City...about eighteen miles distant...through the snow on the less than stellar roads of the day, and he still rolled onto the scene only forty-five or so minutes after that cataclysmic 'CRA-WHUMP!!' echoed across the beet fields. So he knew that it hadn't been snowing but so hard at the time of the crash. But he did ask (As did the ICC investigators later) to make it official. Witnesses, including several of the surviving students, noted that the road was clear, with absolutely no snow on it at all, and that the bus didn't so much as slip a single time along it's route. So road conditions played absolutely no part in the accident.

The ICC accident investigation branch...fore-runner of the present day NTSB...was just as thorough as today's organization, though they didn't have the technology that's taken for granted today to help them out.. Measurements were taken and recorded, dozens of pictures taken (Cameras had gotten pretty sophisticated by 1938) and witnesses were interviewed. They were even able to determine the train's exact speed at the moment of impact...steam locomotives were nearing their zenith of technical sophistication in 1938 (Diesels were already beginning to encroach on the steamers' kingdom by the late 30s) and 3708 had a speed register tape, integrated with it's Valve Pilot (An early fuel efficiency device), that recorded the train's speed, giving the investigators a actual readout of just how fast the train was going when it hit the bus as well as it's speed for the few minutes just preceding the accident.

The bus chassis was jammed up under 3708's pilot so tightly that torches had to be used to free it, then the locomotive's pilot truck had to be rereailed. This took time of course, and when these tasks were finished another locomotive was brought in to complete the run and 3708 was taken to the railroad's shops and gone over with a fine toothed comb. The mechanics and investigators wielding that comb found out exactly what Rehmer probably told them in the first place...that the big Challenger class locomotive was operating perfectly. There was just absolutely no way to get a fifty car freight train stopped in 200...or, for that matter, 2000...feet.

The basic cause of the accident was actually pretty easily determined...Silcox drove the bus in front of the train. What wasn't so easy to figure out...and remains unknown to this very day...was just why he drove the bus in front of the train. I have a sneakin' suspicion that this is why, as the story of the crash was told and retold over the years, the weather conditions have become exaggerated to the point that, in just about every account I've read, the storm was described as a full blown blizzard. If it was snowing that hard, that had to be the reason Silcox, who was known to be very responsible, drove in front of the train. The way looked clear when he checked, then, just as he drove onto the tracks,The Flying Ute just suddenly appeared out of a wall of falling show like some deadly wraith.

The ICC report actually refutes that cause pretty handily, but you don't even need that very informative document to see that Sandy, Utah's first snowstorm of the winter of '38/'39 wasn't anything close to a blizzard. You just need the photos that appeared on the front page of pretty much every newspaper in the US in the days after the accident. If you look at the accident scene photos, you quickly realize that it couldn't have been snowing but so hard at the accident scene, because there's just not that much snow on the ground. On top of that, as noted above, Lote Kinney stated that he could see a good half mile when he got to the scene, and as I also noted above, one of the very first things he did upon arriving was to confirm that these same conditions existed when the accident occurred.

I have a feeling that Silcox got lured onto the crossing by that same old bug-a-boo that's caused many a train-bus crash, one that can affect even the best and safest drivers...complacency. The Flying Ute should have passed Burgon's crossing almost four hours earlier, before anyone on that bus even thought about waking up. Even with Silcox starting the route early...even if he started the route an entire hour early...the train should have passed through three hours before the bus trundled onto the tracks at Burgon's Crossing.

Silcox wasn't expecting a train. He probably stopped, glanced to the right for an instant, not opening the door to preserve what little warmth the clear vision windows contributed, and, in his mind, saw exactly what he was expecting to see...no train. Unfortunately, of course,, there was a train, right on top of them, and I think Silcox did something that all of us have done while driving. Stop at a stop-sign where there's always very little traffic, glance both ways for an instant, and start moving before your brain yells 'whoa!!', making you look again and foot-stab the brakes just as the trash truck you almost missed seeing, even though it was there, trundles through the intersection. This is very likely exactly what happened to Silcox...except that, when his mind yelled 'Whoa!!' it it was a train that he missed seeing, and when he foot-stabbed the brakes, it was too late.

According to every modern account I read about the accident...most written as either the unveiling of the memorial that was erected to memorialize the victims of the crash or the anniversary of the accident approached...the laws requiring school bus drivers to stop, open the door and side window, and actively look for a train, were enacted as a result of this accident. In another eerie precursor to Evans, a track-walker was also required....in Utah...for a while until that portion of the law was repealed because of the hazard that whoever walked the crossing was exposed to.

And I have a feeling that the 'In Utah' that I noted above is a clue here. I think the more stringent laws were enacted in Utah, and possibly a few other states, but it wasn't federally mandated, nor was it quite as stringent as the laws enacted after the Spring City crash, which required drivers to silence everyone and every thing on the bus that could make noise before listening for an oncoming train.

And it's not like laws didn't already exist...there was, in fact, already a law on the books in Utah requiring school bus drivers to stop at crossings, reading as follows:

'The driver of any motor bus carrying passengers for hire or any school bus carrying children shall, before crossing any track of a railway, stop such vehicle not less than 10 feet or more than 50 feet from the nearest rail of such track, and while stopped shall look and listen for any approaching railway trains and for whistles or other warnings indicating the approach of a train, and shall not proceed until it is safe to do so'

So the basic gist of the laws we know now was already in place when this crash happened, as I have a feeling that, by that time, all of the 48 states then comprising the U.S. had a law requiring school buses to stop at railroad crossings. So this accident isn't the one that caused laws requiring school buses to stop at crossings to be put in place, nor are any of the ones that occurred later....those laws were already in place.  I did read in one source that immediately after this accident the ICC 'Strongly Recommended' that a requirement that school bus drivers not only stop at grade crossings, but also open the door to ensure that they could hear an oncoming train, be implemented and enforced. I don't know how widely this recommendation was accepted though. 

I very definitely think that each crash caused something to be added to the laws governing school buses and railroad crossings, often only in the state where the accident occurred, until the Department of Transportation finally mandated that the best features of all of the state laws be combined and tweaked, and that this standardized law be put in place in every state.

Whatever laws and safety improvements were inspired by the accident were no great comfort to the residents of Sandy, South Jordan, and environs there-of. Christmas in that then-tiny community was shattered that year as twenty three families (Three families lost two children each) planned funerals rather than Christmas celebrations, and the community suffered and mourned right along with them. Jordan High had four hundred students, Sandy had 1500 people. Everyone at Jordan High probably knew most, if not all of the kids on that bus. Everyone in the area was affected...everyone in Sandy, South Jordan, and several other small towns JHS drew it's student body from knew at least a couple of the kids on the bus. The funerals probably seemed to go on forever.

****************************************************************************

Helen Young                                                        Rela Beckstead

Helen and Rela were best friends 

 

Neal Wilson Densley                                         James Carlisle

 

Robert Egbert                                                   William Glazier

George Albert Hunt                                               Lois Johnson

Bayard Larson                                                        Rosa Larson

Naomi Lewis                                                             Helen Lloyd

Del Marcy                                                                   Raye Miller

Virginia Nelson                                                 Allan Peterson

Roland Page                                                         Duane Parkinson

Roland's girlfriend was also killed in the accident. 

Kenneth C. Peterson                              Harold Sandstrom  
Carol Stephenson

Ida Viola Sundquist                                       Wilbert Webb

Naomi Webb Dean                                         Leroy Winward

************************************************************************************

<***>Notes, Links, and Stuff<***>

The other posts in this series

in the order they were posted.

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/evans-colorado-bustrain-crash.html  Evans, Colo December 1961

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/spring-city-tenn-bustrain-crash.html  Spring City Tenn. August 1955

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/congers-new-york-bustrain-crash.html  Congers New York  

March 1972

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/lake-station-indiana-church-bustrain.html Lake Station Indiana

October 1971

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/stratton-nebraska-church-bustrain-crash.html  Stratton Nebraska 

August 1976

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/fox-river-grove-illinois-bustrain-crash.htm Fox River Grove Illinois October 1995

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/conasauga-tennesee-bustrain-crash.html  Conasauga Tenn.
  March 2000

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2016/03/sandy-utah-bus-train-crashthe-worst.html   Sandy, Utah Dec 1938

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2016/03/proberta-california-train-bus-crash.html  Proberta, California Nov 1921

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2016/02/shreve-ohio-and-berea-ohio-school.html  Shreve and Berea Ohio Jan. 1930

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2016/03/crescent-city-florida-trainschool-bus.html  Crescent City, Florida December 1933

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2016/03/rockville-md-train-bus-crash-april-11th.html  Rockville, Maryland April 1935

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2016/03/mason-city-iowa-bus-train-crash.html  MAson City, Iowa Oct. 1937

http://disasteroushistory.blogspot.com/2016/03/eads-tennessee-trainschool-bus-crash.html Eads, Tennessee Oct. 1941

<***>

I'm doing the same thing with the second half of my 'School bus/Train crash' series of articles that I did with the first half..starting with the worst and most infamous of the bunch, then taking the others in chronological order. And I'm kind of working backwards while I'm at it...the first half of the series covered 1955 to the present, while this set of posts covers 1920 or there-abouts to 1954.

Not only is the Sandy bus crash the the worst of the accidents covered in this set of posts, as noted above, it was the worst school bus-train crash, and the worst crossing accident in U.S. History. That being the case, you'd think that there would be all kind of accurate information on-line about this one. Guess what, gang...ain't the way it happened.

Oh, there are loads of articles out there. Problem is, a lot of the basic information's just dead wrong. The majority of the articles I found were written as the date of the unveiling of a monument to the crash victims approached, and all of them...Every. Single. One....repeated the 'Train Suddenly Appeared Out Of The Blizzard' story. A couple of them had the number of cars on the train wrong. The speed at impact varied from the correct '50MPH' (OK, it was actually 52, but at least they were close) to 60MPH. The articles couldn't even agree on the number of fatalities, ranging from 23 (The original reported number of deaths at the time of the accident) to 27 (One more than actually died). Making things even more difficult, I had trouble finding any contemporary articles about the crash, even coming up dry at the Genealogy site that I use as one of the base sources for subjects for my blog, and That really surprised me.

By sheer luck I ran up on a link for an archive of old, old ICC/NTSB reports, going back to the very early part of the 20^th century, and while every report of every accident that was investigated in the century and change span covered by the archive isn't in the archive, this one (As well as a couple of others I was looking for) was. Thanks to that chance finding of a link to an archive of ancient Interstate Commerce Commission accident reports, this post is hopefully accurate...or as accurate as I could make it at any rate.

Then, with a little bit more research and with the help of the great cyber-know-it-all, Google, I finally found a couple of archived newspaper articles that gave me a few more facts...such as the engineer's and fireman's first and last names...not included in the ICC report...allowing me to make this a bit more than a couple of paragraphs of maybe-facts and lots of speculation. Oh I speculated a bit...it's one of the things I do. But I really do like to include at least a few actual, accurate facts in my posts as well.

Though the basic info wasn't accurate in the modern articles, they did contain a couple of pretty awesome human interest stories, which I'll relate below...So lets do the notes...

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It took a quarter century for a memorial to be erected in honor of the victims of the crash. I couldn't find a whole lot of information about just why it took so long for these kids to be memorialized, but when it was finally done, it was done right.

The monument is a ten foot polished marble obelisk, located at Community Center/Heritage Park, 10778 S. Redwood Road in South Jordan, and has brass plaques at the base telling the story of the crash and naming all 39 students who were aboard the bus. Sadly, I couldn't find a good picture of the memorial

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Remember Virginia Nelson's English homework? That page or so of verb problems ended up being a story of it's own. Her little sister now has a scrap that's all that remains of that homework...but it's a scrap that has Virginia's name on it. And she didn't get it back for 75 years.

Joyce Nelson was devastated by her big sister's death. I believe Joyce was in elementary school when Virginia was killed, and she found out about the accident and the death of her sister through what she probably thought was going to be a pleasant surprise...seeing her parents swing into the school driveway early in the day, then seeing her mom or dad at the classroom door, getting her out of school way early. Puzzled jubilation, sadly, quickly gave way to devastation...and she's missed Virginia ever since. Her big sis had always had her back, had always been someone she could look up to and ask for advice, had been her partner in crime, sounding board, and confidant...and now she was gone. Christmas didn't even exist that year. The tears have lasted for 75 years.

A handsome kid named Carol (Pronounced as if it were 'Carl' ) Stephenson,  who looked like he had just a spark of good natured mischief in his eyes, and who was probably seriously popular with the ladies of JHS...he just looked the type...was also killed in the crash. His parents possibly picked the scrap of homework up at the scene while looking for any of his possessions that may have been scattered along the tracks. The scrap of homework ended up in a box of Carol's possessions that Stephenson family kept to remember him by, and this box was passed down through the years until it came into the hands of Carol's niece, Caroleen, who was born some years after his death. She had looked at this scrap of homework numerous times, keeping it even though it had nothing to do with her uncle, because, after all, it belonged to one of the kids who was killed in the accident, very likely a friend of Carol's, and besides....it would mean something to someone. Problem was, there was really no way to easily find out just who. Nearly three quarters of a century had passed. The survivors of the accident would all be in their late 80s or early 90s. People had married, moved, and passed away in the intervening 75 years. Still, she hung onto it, hoping that somehow, she could get it to a relative of the young lady who'd originally finished it...

Then, as 2013 drew to a close, the accident's approaching 75^th anniversary inspired another round a of articles, one of which announced the unveiling of the memorial on Dec 1^st, 2013. Caroleen decided to make the three hundred or so mile trip from Glendale, Utah to attend the unveiling in order to honor her uncle...and hopefully find someone in Virginia Nelson's family to give the homework paper. It was, she knew, a fairly remote possibility.

Virginia Nelson's long lost homework assignment.

...With her name still legible at the top of the page.
 Both pictures courtesy of KSL-TV Salt Lake City, Utah.

After the monument was unveiled, the names of the victims were read off and as Virginia Nelson's name was read off a still very spry older lady stood. Caroleen made her way over to her and asked her if she had been related to Virginia Nelson. The lady..Now Joyce Holder, formerly Joyce Nelson...told her that why, yes, Virginia had been her older sister.

Caroleen held out the tattered homework paper, now protected in a plastic bag, and said 'I believe this was your sister's. Tears appeared in Joyce Holders eyes as she saw Virginia's name on the still very readable page. She had idolized her big sis, still missed her to that very day. Now she had something tangible...something that Virginia had actually handled...to remember her by.

Of course that wasn't the end of the story...Caroleen had a 300 mile drive home ahead of her, and wanted to get on the road, so she told Joyce that she was so glad she'd found her, wished her well, and said she had to get on the road. Somewhere in there she never introduced herself. Joyce set out on a mission of her own...to find the person who returned Virginia's homework to her. Of course, that was far easier than Caroleen's search for her had been, because the story was published statewide, and Caroleen saw one of the articles, got in touch with Joyce, and introduced herself.

Somewhere, in Heaven, an angel named Virginia's smiling down on her little sis, and saying 'Hey, I've always had your back, Sis...I'm still with you'. And, being eternally fifteen, she's looking at that homework paper and thinking 'Shoot...I'd've aced the thing, too!!!'

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One of the many tragedies of a young person's death is the lost potential...there is no way to regain that potential, or to know just what contributions to society that person may have made. One of the best illustrations of this from the Sandy, Utah accident is the poem that seventeen year old Naomi Lewis penned the night before the accident, possibly for a homework assignment, that I've included below.

"Earth's Angels"
I like to think that wind
Is angels in the trees,
Stately noble angels
That no one ever, ever sees.
When the world is peaceful
And people are living right,
They rustle the branches gently
Throughout the entire night.
But when the world is wicked
Then sorrow bursts from the trees.
And it sounds like the wailing,
Woeful hum
Of hostile, atrocious bees.
But in my imagining
It's angels sorrowing in the tree.
At night they call a council
Of angels on the earth,
Each angel chooses a mortal
To guide to his preordained worth.
So I like to think that wind
Is angels in the trees
Stately, noble angels
That no one ever, ever sees.

Naomi Lewis, age 17, penned the night before she died in the bus/train wreck.

<***>

The only thing worse for parents than the nightmare of loosing a child is loosing more than one child at the same time. Three sets of siblings were among those killed in the accident. It could have been even worse...there were also three sets of siblings among the survivors.

The horrible phenomenon of loosing several sets of siblings in the same accident has just become possible within the last century and change. It's occurred in multiple school bus accidents (And not just accidents involving trains) over the past 120 or so years, and happened in the second worse train-school bus collision (The one in Evan's Colorado, in December 1961) as well. It's an occurrence that's too horrible to even contemplate...but than again the death of any child is as well.

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Speaking of the Evan Colorado Accident, The Sandy and Evans accidents, separated by twenty-three years, share a striking number of similarities:

>Both occurred in December, in small towns in the Western U.S.

>Both occurred in the morning,while the bus was on the way in to school.

>There was snow on the ground at both scenes.

>Both occurred at unsignalled crossings.

>The chassis of both buses were built by GMC (Known as General Motors Truck Corp back in The Thirties)

>The bus windows were fogged over in both cases
>The driver actually did stop the bus short of the crossing in both cases...then proceeded after not seeing the oncoming train.

>A passenger sitting in the front seat of the bus saw the train and shouted 'TRAIN!!!' an instant before the collision in both accidents.

>In both accidents the driver was known to be very responsible, making it all the more puzzling that he drove in front of a train.

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While there is some dispute over which accident prompted what laws to be enacted at what point in time in which state, one thing that the Sandy accident did inspire was national talks on warning devices at railroad crossings. The flashing red light signal was actually first developed in 1913...about the same time flashing red warning lights began appearing on emergency vehicles, and actually a year before the Wig-Wag signals discussed in the article on the Stratton Nebraska crash were first put in use...but it was nothing like the alternating light RR warning signals we're so familiar with. It consisted , very likely, of a single flashing light (Paired with an electric bell) mounted high on the pole, above the cross-buck sign. The alternating light signal was developed in the thirties, as was the automatic crossing gate. The alternating light signal really began taking hold in the late Thirties to early Forties, and the Sandy, Utah accident is the one that caused their development and implementation to be pushed. The wild thing is, though, to this day, there are still unprotected crossings, especially in very rural areas.

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This wasn't the only train/school bus crash in the Salt Lake City area during The Thirties, and the other one I found was unusual in a couple of respects.

Apparently school buses were picked up at the factory and driven home by their assigned drivers back in the thirties, at least they were back then in Utah, and that's exactly what Issac Draper did in late Feb/early March of 1935, just shy of three years before the Sandy bus accident. He traveled to Detroit...probably by train...and picked up a brand new bus, driving it back to Mapleton. Keep in mind here that this was 1935, and while the highway system had advanced by leaps and bounds over what it had been even just twenty years earlier, there were no interstates, and few multi-lane highways...the great majority of highways were two lane roads, so it was probably a multi-day road trip adventure.

On the evening of March 2^nd, 1935, Draper was drawing close to home in Mapleton...about 40 miles south of Sandy and straddling the same line of the D&RGW that the Sandy accident had occurred on. He stopped to visit his daughter for a few minutes, probably also using the break to stretch his legs for a bit, then headed for home, only a few miles and about twenty or so minutes distant. In order to get to his home, west of Mapleton near Genola, he had to cross the D&RGW tracks, at the crossing hard by the Mapleton railroad station. A D&RGW passenger train...one not scheduled to stop at Mapleton...was approaching the crossing at the same time Draper rolled up on it. Now, having no kids on board, Draper wasn't required to stop at all, but it would seem to be common sense as well as instinctive self-preservation to do so anyway. But then again, he'd just driven a school bus over 1000 miles. He was probably tired as hell of, as the classic 70s song states, 'The engine droning out it's one lone song'. He was tired in general. He wanted to get home and prop his feet up on something that wasn't moving. The bus was closed up tight, so he apparently didn't hear the whistle. And the train was hidden by the station as he rolled onto the crossing.

The bus just suddenly appeared from behind the station and the train's engineer didn't even have time to dump the brakes before they hit the bus, wrapping it around the front of the locomotive, then scattering bus parts for 1150 feet as the train, it's brakes locked after they hit, slid, the shattered bus tearing out cattle guards on both side of the tracks as it was dragged. Draper's body was thrown clear 450 feet from the crossing. Weather conditions were clear, but Draper was probably about ready to drop, and probably daydreaming about being home and sleeping in his own bed. Investigators determined that Draper's view of the approaching train was obscured by the station, and that his fatigue was very much a contributing factor in the crash.

Sadly, Draper, who farmed as well as driving a school bus, left behind a huge family...a wife and nine kids (Six sons and three daughters). The crossing where the accident occurred was, of course, unsignalled.

<***>

Though Sandy grew in leaps and bounds over the past nearly eighty years, and the road system and street layout changed completely, the crossing where the Sandy bus/train crash occurred remained in place until 2002. The crossing had been upgraded to include signals decades earlier by that time of course, but accidents still managed to occur there, with the last fatality occurring on New Years Eve 1995 when three teens were killed when they tried to beat the train. The last accident to occur there was in 2002, just before the crossing was removed, when the driver of a pickup ignored the signals and drove onto the crossing.

<***>

The original Jordan High School...the destination that the bus never reached...has an interesting story of it's own. Some of it still exists...as a movie theater.

The original building was built in 1914, and would ultimately be included on the National Register of Historic Places. It was a immense solid two story brick structure with an English basement,..pretty much the traditional vision of 'Early 20^th Century School Building'...and actually had a good bit more capacity than needed when opened.

The building was in use from 1914 to 1996...82 years...and was finally replaced with the current building, located only a mile or so away, when it became sorely apparent that it was now far too small...despite additions over the years...and that it was really beginning to show it's age.

The building's issues had been becoming...well...issues for years, and the building was almost replaced in the mid Seventies...as in a replacement school was actually in the early stages of construction, but the school district looked at the student population and projected growth of same, realized that they actually needed a new school as well as Jordan high, and what would have been New Jordan High became one of JHS biggest rivals...Alta High School.

The new Jordan High was finally built and opened in 1996, with a capacity of 2600 students and was one of the nicest school buildings in the nation. And...just to show that 'Be True To Your School' is more than a Beach Boys song, when the school district asked the student body if they wanted to change the school's mascot, colors, and logo to reflect their new digs...

OK, Jordan High's sports teams have been 'The Beetdiggers, in honor of the areas beginnings as one of the primary sugar beet growing regions in the nation, since 1914. The colors have been Maroon and Gray for the same period of time. The general consensus was something to the effect of...

 'Really?? Really, Dudes??? Are you freaking kidding???...No we don't want to change any of the above!!!'

  Beetdiggers they were, and Beetdiggers they stayed (And still are). They tend, from what I've read, to field gridiron powerhouses every fall.

But what of the old building? Being a truly beautiful building on the National Register of Historic Places, you'd think something would have been done with it, and it was...sort of. When a guy named Larry Miller bought the old school and property, he did so so he could build and promote one of the Salt Lake City areas biggest entertainment and shopping venues...Jordan Commons. When the old building was torn down, the front entrance facade was saved and incorporated into the main entrance of Jordan Commons.

Old Jordan High School's entrance facade...steps and all...was used as the entrance to the Jordan Commons Megaplex theater complex, built on the site of the old school. Old Jordan high School's shown in the inset for comparison.  The developers did a pretty decent job incorporating the entrance facade into the modern building, but I still think it would have been far better if the old school itself could have been preserved.

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JHS being the destination never reached, and the accident being the worst crossing accident in US History, there are a few ghost stories attached to the old school. Supposedly seven chairs would be found formed into a circle in the cafeteria...when the chairs were put back where they belonged, they'd be discovered an hour or so later, back in the circle. Voices had been heard in the band room and in one of the girls' restrooms when there was no one around. Ghostly apparitions were seen in the halls. All were, apparently, benevolent spirits, and a couple of them apparently made their way to the theater complex as well, as the vision of a lady and teen age girl talking have been seen by maintenance and housekeeping personnel in the mall in the area that would have been the very hallway where this same pair of apparitions  was seen several times when the school was still open. They haven't yet made themselves known to shoppers, however.

There's another, far more famous ghost story that the crash may have helped create...but that's a story for another post.

 <***>LINKS<***>

As I noted a couple of times in this post, there were a slew of articles about the accident out there, but the ICC report makes their accuracy somewhat suspect, with the time-worn 'The Train Appeared Out Of A Blizzard' story being the part of the story that the report most decisively debunked.

First up...the archived ICC report...it's also down loadable as a PDF file. You'll need Adobe Reader or similar PDF reader to view the PDF version:

http://dotlibrary.specialcollection.net/Document?db=DOT-RAILROAD&query=%28select+2263%29

http://www.galecenter.org/exhibits-busaccident.asp The Gale Center of History and Culture has an extensive exhibit about the accident, including a lengthy and informative video about the accident, as well as the story of Naomi Lewis' poem

http://tinyurl.com/kp2q5jd Desert News article about the accident.

http://tinyurl.com/mkyhql3 Salt Lake Tribune article about the accident...Wanda Shields story is included in this article, as well as a discussion of modern school bus safety.

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=vcsr&GSvcid=103074 Find A Grave page about the accident.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgYuzbiN83s A quick YouTube video from Critical Past, with archived news real footage of the scene. There are several views of the rear half of the bus

KSL TV in Salt Lake City broadcast a series of segments on the accident and it's aftermath, all of them pretty decent, though all do indeed include the 'Blizzard':

http://www.ksl.com/?sid=27814442 KSL article and video about the memorial...several interviews with survivors and relatives of survivors are also included, as well as a photo gallery. The map included in the article is of the memorial site, not the accident site.

http://tinyurl.com/kvmc979 Quick article about the unveiling of the memorial.

http://www.ksl.com/?sid=27982346 Article and video about the return of Virginia Nelson's homework to her younger sister...An interview with Joyce Nelson Holder is included. The video is far more moving than the short bit of text I gave it here.

http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=148&sid=28008687 Article and video about the lady who returned the homework.