The Porter, Indiana Diamond Crossing Collision

 Porter, Indiana Diamond Crossing Collision

February 27, 1921

The Last Major Diamond Crossing Wreck

By the beginning of the 20th Century's third decade, the railroad had become the way to go if you were planning to travel any distance at all. Long distance travel by car was, at best, an adventure, and at worst, downright dangerous. While roads such as the Lincoln Highway, did exist, they were few, far between, unpaved and generally unimproved for most of their length. Most long distance car travel was on unimproved...and uncharted...paths, and a trip from, say, Long Beach, California to Cincinnati Ohio, could and did take literally weeks.

Traveling by train, meanwhile, was fast, comfortable, and convenient. By 1921, railroads boasted 253,000 miles of track connecting almost every city and town in the Continental U.S., and when you traveled by train, you traveled in well appointed, comfortable coaches equipped with steam heat, slept in comfortable beds in luxurious Pullman sleeping cars, and ate full course meals that wouldn't have been at all out of place in a five-star-restaurant, served in dedicated, well-appointed dining cars.

OF course, with just more than a quarter million miles of track stuffed into the 48 Continental States, it stands to reason that rail lines would cross each other pretty regularly, especially near population centers. The great majority of these crossings were 'Grade Separated'...a fancy, technical term for 'Using Bridges'...but there were still a slew of places where rail lines crossed each other at grade, using 'Diamond Crossings', so named because the rails in such a crossing formed a 'diamond' when viewed from above.

A diamond crossing, where two rail lines cross each other at grade. While these two rail lines cross at right angles, the tracks at the Porter, Indiana diamond crossing, where the wreck featured in this post occurred, crossed at about a forty-five degree angle.

The major problem with diamond crossings was, of course, the possibility of two trains arriving at the crossing at the exact same time. Good traffic control procedures and strict adherence to safety regulations were an absolute must to prevent that from happening.. And when those procedures and regulations were ignored, collisions inevitably occurred, and some of those collisions...such as the one I'm covering in this post...were catastrophic.

And I'm not talking just spur lines and/or interurban lines crossing each other or even spur lines and Interurban tracks crossing major railroad main lines, though there were probably hundreds of such crossings in the country. I'm talking two major railroads crossing each other at grade. And yes, this was absolutely as dangerous as it seems. The very first major loss-of-life train wreck in the country was at such a crossing when a Michigan Southern passenger train broadsided a Michigan Central immigrant train just south of Chicago at a diamond crossing back in 1853...keep those two railroads in mind, BTW. They figure prominently in this story as well.

Of course, in the nearly seventy years separating that very first major rail disaster and the wreck featured in this post, railroad technology had advanced in leaps and bounds, especially safety technology.  In 1853, only strict adherence to time tables and railroad policy and procedure kept trains from plowing into each other...which they did anyway, regularly....and on top of that, trains were only equipped with hand-operated brakes that had to be applied separately on each car, making stopping quickly in an emergency impossible.

 By February, 1921...when this post's accident occurred...all major railroads utilized automatic block signaling, while our diamond crossings were protected and controlled by interlocking towers, automatic train detection circuits, block signals, and derailers. Brake technology had advanced exponentially as well...by 1921, trains were equipped with air brakes that made instantly locking up every brake on a long train as easy as yanking a brake valve handle back into emergency ('Big-holing' it in railroad-speak).

Sadly, all of the safety tech in the world won't prevent a wreck if old man Murphy, of Murphy's Law fame, frowns down upon you and something goes wrong. Diamond crossings were already pretty well protected back in 1896, when forty people died in a diamond crossing collision just west of Atlantic City despite the crossing being protected by an interlocking tower and block signals.

 A quarter century later, the diamond crossing in Porter, Indiana, where this post's wreck occurred, was very well protected with all of the safety devices mentioned above, yet all of that tech didn't even come close to preventing the deaths of 37 people when a Michigan Central passenger train ran a red signal and got T-boned by a New York Central passenger train at a crossing just inside that small city.

 BTW...does one of those railroads sound familiar? Keep reading.

So, obviously, we're heading for the far northwestern corner of Indiana, to Porter County (Which, despite it's name, the City of Porter is not the county seat of) and when I say the far northwestern corner of Indiana, I absolutely mean it. Porter County is in Indiana's northernmost row of counties, only one county away from Illinois to the west, while it's northern boundary is a little body of water known as Lake Michigan (And if you dive in and start swimming, depending on whether you swim far enough northwest or northeast, you'll be swimming in either Illinois' or Michigan's piece of the lake.)

The City of Porter itself is tucked up into a small chunk of north central Porter County, about eleven miles east of  Gary, Indiana and around thirty or so miles southeast of Chicago's storied 'Loop'. Porter was conceived, founded and built as a railroad town, and was the terminal for the Chicago & West Michigan Railroad, which was one of three lines that merged to form the Pierre Marquette Railroad in 1899.

Several other railroads either had facilities in Porter, or passed through the city, and I have a feeling that the little city was a division point for several of those lines. Two of the lines that passed through Porter...the Michigan Central and the Michigan Southern & Northern Indiana, usually referred to as simply the Michigan Southern...crossed at a diamond crossing that was tucked into an out-jutting toe of the small city, just 300 feet north and 500 feet west of the city line and a scosh under 300 feet west of the city's Wagner Road. 

Yep...that's right. The two railroads involved in the nation's very first major loss-of-life train wreck, which was a diamond crossing collision, also crossed at another diamond crossing in Porter. A diamond crossing that was the scene of another major diamond crossing collision, involving essentially those same two railroads, just shy of sixty-eight years later. The Michigan Southern survived a couple of organizational and ownership changes over the years before becoming part of the ginormous New York Central system in 1919, but it was still the old Michigan Southern right-of-way. The plot, as they say, thickens.

Rail traffic was heavy, particularly near major population centers, and most particularly near major railroad towns, such as Chicago and, well, Porter Indiana. Some of these waypoints saw upwards of and even more than a hundred trains a day, and one of these uber-busy waypoints was the New York Central/Michigan Central diamond crossing in Porter. Traffic control to keep trains from simultaneously occupying the same point in both space and time was absolutely essential. 

 The Wagner Road Diamond Crossing had been there for decades and, in a perfect world, of course, the crossing would have been 'Grade Separated (Again, a fancy way of saying 'One line crossing the other on a bridge). But, of course, the two lines crossed at grade and, on top of that, the Michigan Central, which ran from northwest to southeast, crossed the New York Central, which ran just about due east west, at about a 45 degree angle. This wasn't optimal by any means, as this was a seriously busy pair of rail lines, but despite this fact, there hadn't been a single major wreck, or even minor accident there since the crossing was installed. I can't help but think that, especially back in the 'time table 'era of rail traffic control, luck had a lot to do with this run of good fortune.

As railroad safety technology improved, traffic control at the diamond became more sophisticated. A interlocking tower was built hard by the Michigan Southern/New York Central tracks in the crossing's northwest quadrant, and several levels of mechanical interlocks, and visual signals were installed to protect the crossing...by early 1921 the level of sophistication displayed in the crossing's safety devices was impressive even by today's standards.

Lets take a look at these safety controls.

The Porter interlocking tower was a two story, wooden structure, probably about twenty or so feet by ten feet, that housed the manual interlocking levers that controlled the block signals and derailers protecting the crossing, and the operators tasked with actually, well, operating said controls. The upper part of the second floor was almost all windows, giving the tower operators a good 360 degree view of the tracks approaching the crossing and allowing them to see any trains that might be getting ready to enter the diamond.

The Porter, Indiana interlocking tower as it appeared in April 1981. It didn't look all that much different than it did sixty years earlier, in February of 1921. The diamond crossing that the tower had been built to control had been eliminated years before the tower posed for this portrait, and the tower itself would be torn down shortly after the picture was taken.

Interior of an interlocking tower, showing the levers that controlled signals and turnouts. These levers manipulated metal rods, connected by a cam and lever mechanism, to control the signals/turnouts, and the rods, encased in metal tubes for protection, could run for as much as a mile. It took a bit of muscle and stamina to move the things.

One problem...both the New York Central and Michigan Central were double-tracked at the Porter diamond crossing back in 1921, which meant that the tower operator had to watch for trains coming from four...count 'em...four different directions. Generally, there was only one tower operator, and one 'leverman' on duty, so keeping an eye on four tracks using only the Mark 1 Eyeball wasn't exactly an easy task. On top of that, the Michigan Central tracks curved about 600 feet or so southwest of the crossing, which meant the tower operators couldn't see any eastbound Michigan Central trains until they came around that curve. 

Thankfully, our tower operator didn't have to rely on visually spotting an approaching train. An annunciator circuit was installed on the approach side of all four tracks, with the contacts for the annunciators just under 2 miles from the tower on the NYC tracks, and a little over 9,000 feet out on the Michigan Central. This circuity operated in much the same manner as automatic highway grade crossing signals...when a locomotive rolled across the contact, tripping the circuit, it activated a light in the tower as well as a buzzer for trains on the NYC tracks, and a bell for trains on the Michigan Central tracks.

My bet is these lights were on a schematic diagram of the crossing, drawn on a board mounted on the tower wall, possibly in one of the corners so it was easily visible from anywhere in the room. This allowed the operator to glance up at the board and instantly see on which line and from which direction a train was approaching when the buzzer or bell activated,.

The operator would look at the board, ascertain which of the tracks the train was on, then set the block signals to favor that train, and stop trains on the other line. So, if the buzzer hits, and our operator glances at the board and sees the light for, say, the westbound New York Central track glowing at him, he immediately sets the block signals to allow that train to pass, and stop trains on the Michigan Central tracks.

These block signals would have been semaphore signals back during that era, and were manually operated, using four foot high levers to move metal rods that passed through mile-long pipes to connect to the signal mechanism... manipulating the things was not a task for the faint of heart or muscle.

A semaphore signal similar to the ones controlling the diamond crossing in this post. Signals protecting diamonds crossings were arranged in pairs, with a 'Distant' signal a mile or so out, and a 'Home' signal a few hundred feet before the crossing. Like a traffic light's indications, the ''Distant' signal gave prior warning if the 'Home' signal was set to 'Stop'.

Let's assume the signal shown is a 'Distant' signal.  This particular signal is indicating a clear track ahead, and would mean that the Home signal was also showing a clear track, and that the crossing was safe to enter. If the semaphore's arm was down at a 45 degree angle, it would indicate that the next signal...the 'Home' signal....was set to 'STOP', and that the engineer should start slowing in preparation to stop prior to reaching the crossing. If the arm was all the way down, at a right angle to the mast, this would indicate 'STOP'

The signals also had lights, so they would be visible at night. A red light, of course, indicated 'STOP', yellow indicated that the engineer should be ready to stop at the next signal, and green indicated a clear track ahead.

There were still a few...and I mean a very few...of this type signal in service on the BNSF's Glorieta and Raton subdivisions, in New Mexico, as of 2021, but the majority of the nations semaphores have been replaced with more modern signals.

There were four sets of two signals...a 'distant' signal and a 'home' signal for the approach, or inbound, side of each track. We're only worried about two of those approaches...The westbound approach for the NYC, and the eastbound (even though the tracks run southwest-northeast) approach for Michigan Central. There was a distant signal just shy of a mile from the tower on the Michigan Central, another 4,500 feet out on the NYC; and a 'home' signal, around 500 feet from the diamond on the New York Central tracks, and about 370 feet out on the Michigan Central. If the 'home' signal's showing red, with the semaphore arm horizontal, the 'Distant' signal will be at 'caution ' (Yellow), with the semaphore set at a 45 degree angle, to warn the engineer of the approaching train to slow to around 30-35MPH, and prepare to stop at the 'home' signal. These are interlocked signals, so setting one track to 'clear track (Green) automatically set the other track to stop (Red)...in this example both NYC signals would show green while the signals on both the eastbound and westbound Michigan Central tracks would show caution on the distant signal and stop on the home signal. 

The signals also had a 'neutral' position, for want of a better term, and when the levers controlling the signals were set to this neutral position, all of the Distant signals were set to 'Caution, and all of the Home signals signals were set to 'STOP...this would prevent two trains from entering the crossing at the same time if the annunciator failed, or the tower operator, for some reason, missed a buzzer. 

This was a 'first come, first served' system, so if two trains...one NYC, the other Michigan Central...hit the buzzer with-in a minute or so of each other, the first train to hit the buzzer gets the green. Also, there was a 'Time Lock' so to speak on the system...once the signal was set, it couldn't be changed for about three or four minutes.

So lets assume that the signals are set to that neutral position when the buzzer hits...our operator instantly glances at the board to see the 'westbound NYC' light glowing at him. He's already moving towards the four foot tall interlocking levers, grabs the proper one, and pulls it back, changing the signals to 'green' for the NYC, and caution/stop for both Michigan Central approaches to cover any Michigan Central train approaching the crossing from either direction. This is why the annunciator circuit is a good bit further out than the distant signal, so our operator can change the distant signal signal from the neutral 'Yellow-caution' to Green-clear track' before the train that 'hit the buzzer' reaches it.

So...now our signals are set to allow the NYC train to take the crossing, and the crew of any Michigan Central trains approaching will (Or at least should) see the yellow 'Distant' signal, and start slowing so they can stop prior to reaching the red 'Home' signal...and the crossing...allowing the NYC train to safely pass. But...what if for some reason the crew of the Michigan Central train misses both their caution and stop signals?

There was still one more level of protection, this one an absolute last resort. When the block signals went to 'stop' for one of the lines, a 'half switch'...called a split-rail derailer and located about 100 yards before the crossing...is set to derail any train  that passes the 'Stop' signal on the other line before it can reach and foul the crossing.

A split rail derailer. Though this one is used to prevent a runaway rail car on a siding from reaching the main rail line, it's identical in both appearance and operation to the derailer that kicked the Canadian's locomotive and first few cars off of the track in Porter. 

This particular derailer is set to derail any railcar approaching the derailer from behind the photographer and moving towards the turnout...look at the left-hand rail and you can see the path the wheels would take. When the rolling rail car reached the derailer, it's wheels would be forced to the left, off of the rails, where they would bump along the ties and dig into the ballast, stopping the car well before it reached the turnout and entered the main line.

The derailer in Porter, of course, worked the exact same way, except it had to stop an entire train that was moving under power. Had The Canadian been moving slowly enough, the derailer in Porter would have stopped it before it reached the diamond crossing, but, unfortunately, the train was moving too fast to stop before fouling the crossing, even though it was derailed.

If the annunciator failed, or an engineer missed all of the signals, or if a train was approaching the crossing too fast to stop for any reason, its locomotive would hit this derailer, the wheels would be shunted off of the rails, and the now derailed locomotive would bump along on the ties, hopefully stopping short of the diamond. I have a feeling, though, that any engineer whose locomotive had to be stopped by that derailer...on either line...would've had some serious explaining to do.

That's the way it was supposed to happen, and the system functioned perfectly...until it didn't. And that brings us to February 27, 1921.

**

A modern-day satellite image of the Porter, Indiana area with Porter's boundary outlined in red, and the area around the crossing outlined in white. The crossing was just about dead-center of the white outlined area, Immediately west of the tiny eastward-pointing 'toe' of the Porter city line. This area's shown in grater detail in both of the following images.

The town of Chesterton is immediately to the southeast of Porter, and the body of water visible in the upper left of the frame is Lake Michigan. I don't believe the Porter city line extended all of the way to the lake back in 1921, that, rather, is the result of annexations occurring over the last century and small change.

Detail view of the area  designated by the white square in the above image...the white square on this image is the area immediately surrounding the crossing, and is shown in greater detail in the image below. As in the above image, the Porter city line is shown in red. Porter's to the west of the line, Chesterton to the east.

 Both the crossing and the tower were removed decades ago, but the general layout of the area remains very recognizable, The building that housed Porter City Hall and the PVFD's station in 1921, located at 303 Franklin Street and indicated upper mid-frame, was well less than a mile from the accident scene. PVFD was on scene minutes after the wreck happened, and knocked down a fire that got going in the wreckage of the destroyed coach before it got much past the incipient stage. This building also served another, more macabre function after the wreck when it was used as the temporary morgue. The Fire Department moved out of the building long ago, and now has it's own station on West Beam Street, in the extreme upper left of the frame. The building itself was torn down and replaced with a larger, more modern building in 2003.

Also shown is the location of the old post office...immediately to the north of and only about three hundred feet from the scene. This building, also much modified, also still stands. The building was one of two locations where injured passengers were taken for treatment, the other being the Porter train station, which is long gone. 

The rail lines are still in place, though the crossing has been gone since at least the mid or late 1970s. The former New York Central, still double tracked with passing sidings, runs East-West, midframe while the now single tracked former Michigan Central tracks run diagonally from upper right to lower left (Northeast to Southwest). The former Michigan Central tracks still connect to the old NYC lines through turnouts, with the northern section connecting to the west bound track and the southern section to the eastbound track, but there is no longer a diamond crossing there. All of the lines are now part of CSX, I believe. 

Immediate area around the wreck site, with graphics showing the direction of travel of both trains. The NYC's Interstate Express, shown in blue, and the Michigan Central's Canadian, shown in yellow, with the former site of the tower indicated with a green square. The Canadian's engineer and fireman both missed the home signal, which was set at stop, and ran the crossing in front of the Interstate Express, despite hitting the derailer first. The Canadian hit the derailer at around 55 MPH, too fast for it to stop before reaching the crossing even though the locomotive and four of the cars were off of the rails and bumping along the ties.

The locomotive (Michigan Central #8306) rerailed when it hit the crossing, but the tender and cars did not. Locomotive 8306, it's tender, and two of the cars made it through the crossing before stopping. The third car behind the tender, which was a wooden daycoach, came to a stop blocking the crossing, directly in front of the NYC locomotive (#4828). 4828, then slammed into and through the wooden coach at about 50 mph, completely demolishing it and killing 35 passengers.  Locomotive 4828 also hurtled off of the rails, it's front end digging into the ground and causing the locomotive to whip around 180 degrees and slam over onto it's left side, killing both the engineer and fireman.

Credit to the original creator of this image, and to the blog 'Porter County's Past: An Amateur Historian's Perspective', also on Blogger.  

**

Porter was busy enough to have both a tower operator/telegraph operator, who was also the shift supervisor, and a 'leverman', who was tasked with actually operating the interlocking levers to change the signal indications. (Yeah, I know...I left him out in my explanation above...I did so to simplify my explanation of the system's operation.).

There was inevitably a clock on the wall of the interlocking tower, probably one of those big, round, white faced clocks that have graced the walls of schools and offices and factories in one form or the other for well over a century, and as it's minute hand crept ever closer to marking 6:20 PM on that cold late February Sunday evening 102 years ago, there were two trains bearing down on the diamond almost simultaneously...The New York Central's westbound Train #151, The Interstate Express, and the Michigan Central's eastbound Train #20, The Canadian.

A passing siding ran on the south side of the Michigan Central tracks, starting just northeast of the distant signal and ending hard by the tower, just short of the diamond. A third train...a slower moving eastbound Michigan Central freight...had taken the siding several minutes earlier to allow The Canadian to pass.  It had hit the buzzer, of course, and the signals had been set to favor it, but Tower operator Charlie Whitehead knew the freight was due, and that it would take the siding rather than passing through the crossing.

When they saw the freight locomotive's headlight as it eased down the siding, Leverman Joe Cook switched the interlocking lever back to the 'Neutral' position, returning all of the signals to stop. Cook wasn't the regular leverman on this shift, and wasn't familiar with the train schedules, but that wasn't a problem because Whitehead had been working the tower for a good while and was familiar with the train schedule. All of the regular tower operators knew the regularly scheduled trains almost as well as they knew their kids' birthdays, and Whitehead knew that the Interstate Express and The Canadian should hit the buzzer with-in minutes of each other. The only question was, which one would hit first?

The Canadian was due in Porter at 6:15, so it should have hit the buzzer a good five minutes before the Interstate Express, but that night, the Michigan Central train was running about seven minutes late. The Canadian had pulled out of Chicago at 5:05 PM, but had a couple of stops between Chicago and Porter, and apparently spent a bit longer at one of them than normal. Because of this delay it was nearing 6:20 as The Canadian charged towards the diamond, pretty much neck and neck with the westbound Interstate Express, so it was anyone's guess which train would hit the buzzer first. Leverman Cook actually asked Whitehead which line to give the clear signal...he was told (With Whitehead very likely at least mentally sighing and rolling his eyes, as that was a very basic question) to 'Give it to whichever train hits the buzzer first'.

That train ended up being the Interstate Express, with seven cars, headed by NYC locomotive # 4828, with Engineer Claus Johnston at the throttle, and Fireman George Deland stoking. The first car behind the tender was an Arms Palace Co. Horse Transport car, designed and intended to transport high value race horses. The other six, in order, were a combination baggage/passenger car, a pair of coaches, a dining car, and a pair of parlor cars.

A New York Central 4-6-2 'Pacific' class passenger locomotive similar to Locomotive 4828, which was heading up The Interstate Express the night of the wreck. The NYC had dozens of these big 4-6-2's in service, in both passenger and freight service. 4828 was very likely scrapped after the wreck

I scoured the internet, looking for some information on what class of locomotive Michigan Central #8306 was, but found nothing. While it's a good bet that 8306 was another 'Pacific' class, the M.C. ran several classes of passenger locomotives...they also had a slew of 2-8-0s and 4-6-0s, so 8306 could well have been one of those.

An Arms Palace horse car similar to the one that was the first car in the Interstate Express' consist the night of the wreck in Porter. These cars were designed to transport high-value race horses and were usually included in passenger train consists rather than freights for a variety of reasons.

While the horse car being hauled by 4828 had no real bearing on the outcome of the wreck, I included a picture and description of one because of the relative rarity of these cars. No mention of the fate of any horse that might have been aboard the car was made in any article I read about the wreck, so I'm going on the assumption that the car was being hauled 'Dead-head'...empty.

Whitehead told Cook to give the Interstate Express a clear track, Cook moved to the row of shoulder-tall levers, grabbed one of them, and pulled it towards him. On the board, the signal indicators changed to green for the NYC and red for the Michigan Central as, almost a mile away, the Michigan Central Distant signal's blade dropped down to a 45 degree angle, it's light showing yellow while the home signal, just over 350 feet from the tower, dropped to horizontal, its light glowing red.

Joe Cook had hardly pulled the lever back good when the bell for the Michigan Central track sounded, and he and Whitehead both looked at the board to see the annunciator light for the eastbound M.C. tracks glowing at them. The Canadian. The train was about two miles out, and in about a minute or so it's engineer or fireman should spot the distant signal's blade canted up at an angle with a yellow light showing. When they did so, they would...or at least should...start slowing and preparing to come to a full stop.

The Canadian was an interesting train. Though it was listed as eastbound as it approached Porter, the train was actually headed north. The Canadian was a joint venture between the Michigan Central and the Canadian Pacific railroads. The train's final U.S. stop would be Detroit, then after pulling out of Detroit's Union Station, it would cross the Detroit river into Windsor, Ontario, Canada. There The Canadian would become a Canadian Pacific train, and a crew from that line would take it to Toronto and Montreal.

As the train approached the distant signal in Porter, it was headed up by Michigan Central locomotive #8306, with Engineer W.S. Long driving, and Fireman George F. Block stoking. Nine cars followed the locomotive...a baggage car, a smoking car, a day coach, a pair of sleepers, then a pair of parlor cars with a dining car between them, and finally another coach, with all but the two sleepers and the diner being Canadian Pacific rolling stock. The Diner was a M.C. car, while the two sleepers were owned by Pullman and leased to the Michigan Central. Several of the cars, most particularly that first day coach, were constructed primarily of wood with steel undercarriages and trucks. That wooden construction's going to play a huge part in what's to come.

The signal masts were probably located on the left sides of the tracks (Or, possibly, on both sides of the track), because the firemen 'called the signal' for their engineers, and at just a minute or so after 6:20 PM, George Block was leaning out of 8306's left side picture window, peering down the track, looking for the Porter Crossing distant signal. Like Charlie Whitehead in the interlocking tower, train crews knew their own schedules, and knew what other scheduled trains might create a conflict. Thanks to train orders, they also knew about the freight that was waiting in the passing siding...that train wasn't going to be a problem. Block and Long, however, both knew that, because they were running a few minutes late, they'd hit the crossing at about the same time as the NYC's Interstate Express, which potentially could be a problem, so it was absolutely imperative that George Block spotted and called the signal,.

They were probably running about fifty, so a cold headwind was watering his eyes as they approached that long, sweeping curve to the left just south of the crossing and interlocking tower. They were probably still a thousand feet out when Block spotted the distant signal's tiny but bright yellow light-dot, seemingly hanging in space. He looked over towards Long and called 'Yellow board! across the cab. 

If the distant signal showed 'Caution', that meant the home signal, near the crossing, was showing red for 'Stop'. What Long was supposed to do...and indeed, said he did do...was shove the overhead throttle forward, closing it, while also pulling the brake handle back towards him, making a service application of the brakes, and slowing them by about 10 to 15 mph, to around 35MPH, so he could ease to a slow, gentle stop at the 'Home' signal. (They were actually supposed to slow to 40, anyway. The Michigan Central restricted passenger trains to 40MPH when they were crossing a diamond crossing)

With the signal masts being on the left...the inside of the curve...the home signal was apparently visible from the middle of the curve, about a half mile from the signal, and George Block would state that he saw the home signal, showing green when it came into view. He called 'All the way!!', and Long came off of the brakes, and reached up for the throttle, pulling it back towards him, opening the steam valve in the steam dome atop the boiler wide open. The Canadian accelerated, regaining the speed that the brake application had bled off, until it was hurtling towards the diamond at around fifty and still accelerating...

....But as the train hurtled towards the crossing, it's crew didn't realize that they'd made a huge error...fatally huge. The home signal wasn't the only Michigan Central signal signal near the tower. A train order signal...which also displayed either green or red...was hard by the tower. This signal...which indicated to approaching train crews whether or not they needed to stop and pick up new train orders....was showing green. On top of that, smoke and steam from the stopped freight's locomotive was blowing across and often obscuring the home signal.

If George Block did see a green signal glowing at him, it was the train order signal...the home signal was still red. What was supposed  to happen if there was a signal conflict of this nature...a green home signal when it was supposed to be red...the engineer of the approaching train was to maintain the reduced speed, and be prepared to stop, until they could confirm that the home signal was, in fact green (Or determine that it was actually red). At any rate, W.S. Long should have continued towards the crossing at 35 MPH until he and/or George Block could see what color the Home signal was actually showing...this way they could bring the train to a stop, if need be, before reaching the crossing. But they didn't do that, instead accelerating to around 60 or so Miles Per hour... twenty miles per hour faster than the Michigan Central's 40MPH speed limit for passenger trains on diamond crossings. And the fates of 37 people were sealed.

In the cab of NYC Locomotive 4828, Fireman George Deland had no problem at all spotting the NYC Distant and Home signals. The NYC line approaching Porter was arrow-straight for literally miles on either side of the crossing, so they were probably a good half mile from the distant signal when Fireman George Deland spotted the tiny but bright pin-prick of green glowing at them and called 'Green Board' across the big 4-6-2 Pacific's cab. Engineer Claus Johnston acknowledged even as he made a gentle brake application...NYC regs. required them to slow to 50MPH when crossing a diamond crossing. 

A half mile or so beyond the distant signal, a 'Whistle Post'...a white square sign with a black upper-case 'W' painted on it...appeared in the glow of the locomotive's headlight, to the right of the track. Johnston reached up and yanked the whistle lanyard in the long-long-short-long crossing signal, blowing for the Francis Street crossing, about 1200 feet east of the crossing. There would be another whistle post just beyond the Francis Street crossing, for the Wagner Road crossing, just east of the diamond...But they weren't the only train blowing for a crossing of that same road, also right on top of the diamond.

The freight train had actually taken the siding for two reasons...to clear the line for The Canadian, and to take on water, Michigan Central Engineer Curtis had expertly stopped with the tender's water fill opening nearly beneath the big 'U' shaped standpipe. Fireman Arthur climbed up on top of the tender, opened the fill opening's cover, and swiveled the standpipe so it would dump into the tender's water tank, and with the pull of a chain, water was roaring into the tank, sounding like a dozen filling bathtubs on steroids.

As the tank filled, he looked ahead of the locomotive, towards the tower, and saw the home signal's semaphore blade swing down until it was horizontal, with the light glowing red...no big surprise, because they could also see 4828's headlight, far down the long straight stretch, as the Interstate Express roared towards the crossing, coming fast. So, it was a huge surprise when he heard a train blowing for a crossing behind them...the fireman turned to see a headlight sweeping around the curve, also moving fast.

The freight's two brakemen, two men by the names of Wise and Kubbernuss, had walked to the head end of the freight, and were standing next to the cab when they, too, heard The Canadian blowing for the Wagner Road crossing...they then looked towards the tower and also saw the Home signal set to 'Stop'...then, to their horror, they saw 8306's headlight, sweeping out of the long curve, flat out strolling. To the east, they could hear The Interstate Express also blowing for Wagner Road. 

"He ain't even slacking up!!!" One of the brakemen shouted...both men were carrying white lanterns, as much to see by as anything, and both started swinging the lanterns in a ''Ease Up' signal...in seeming answer, The Canadian blew for the crossing again. 'SHIT!!!' one of the brakemen shouted, and dived across the track, standing on the engineers side of the eastbound track, swinging his lantern frantically. The other brakeman did the same on the fireman's side of the track, swinging the lanterns from side to side manically, with absolutely no reply of any kind from the train crew.. All they could do was watch helplessly as the train bore down on them, diving sideways and out of the way as the locomotive blew past them in a bedlam of sound and steam and hot-metal-smell...and then came the 'BAM! of the locomotive hitting the derailer...

...In the tower, Whitehead and Cook could see the bright sun of 4828's headlight, twin spears of reflected brightness racing along the rails ahead of it, as The Interstate Express bore down on the crossing. Then they heard a train blowing for Wagner Road...but the whistle they heard was coming from the south. Both of them knew that The Canadian's engineer was blowing for the Michigan Central's crossing, also of Wagner Road, just north of the tower and well past the diamond, which could only mean...

 Both men spun around to look south, down the Michigan Central tracks, and both of them went cold with dread as they saw The Canadian's headlight sweeping into view from around the curve, still running a good fifty or sixty. Then, as if answering The Canadian's crossing signal, they heard The Interstate Express blowing for the NYC's Wagner Road crossing, and both of them jerked their heads around  and stared at 4828's fast approaching headlight, watched as those light-spears racing along the rails ahead of the locomotive grew shorter and shorter as the train drew closer...

Whitehead turned his head to stare at the fast-approaching Canadian, even as it blew for the Michigan Central's Wagner road crossing a second time... He was also watching the exact same type of twin light-spears racing along the rails in front of 8306, shortening as the train bore down on the crossing.

 'Joe, he's not gonna stop!!! Whitehead called across the tower.

They could now hear the disjointed, out-of-sync 'CHF-CHF-CHF-CHF' of the two big steamers' huffing exhaust. For an instant Whitehead thought about slamming the levers back to the neutral position, making both home signals red...neither train had room to stop, but both would be derailed before they could collide. He rejected that plan in the same instant...he didn't have enough time, and on top of that, the time lock wouldn't let him. On top of that, neither train would have had a hope of stopping, or even slowing but so much...the only question would have been which train would hit a derailer first, and just how bad the resultant wreck would be.

Even though it probably took both trains both a good fifteen seconds or so to eat up the fifteen hundred feet between the whistle posts and the tower, less than an instant seemingly passed before both trains were right on top of the crossing with The Canadian in the lead by a few seconds. The tower was just barely west of the diamond, so when The Canadian roared through the crossing, it would be between it and the on-rushing Interstate Express, putting the tower right in the kill-zone created by any flying debris....but the two men didn't move...yet...

The Canadian's headlight was washing the interior of the tower with light, then the locomotive...very likely another 4-6-2...suddenly jerked to the left, away from the tower, as the locomotive hit the derailer, and the headlight started vibrating, jittering up and down as the locomotive slammed across the ties, splintering them, making a horrible racket backdropped by the 'BAM! BAM! BAM! of the tender, then the cars hitting the derailer and slamming off of the track.

Engineer Long and Fireman Block, in the cab of The Canadian's locomotive  8306, didn't suspect that anything was wrong as they approached the tower, and the crossing. The freight train's cars were to their left, seemingly passing them backwards at about sixty, ahead of them steam and smoke from the freight locomotive was still sweeping across the two-track main line, still obscuring the home signal. Somehow they missed the two brakemen frantically swinging lanterns ahead of them, as well as ghostly red glow of the Home signal shining through the steam-cloud. 

As far as they were concerned, Block had called the signal as clear...they should have a clear track...The tower was spotlighted by their headlight... they were maybe 400 feet...BAM!!!

Both Long and Block were jerked to the right as 8306 hit the derailer, slamming to the left, off of the track and onto the ties, still moving at sixty or so. The locomotive's pilot and right side wheels ripped through the seven by nine inch ties like they were toothpicks, splintering them, while the left side wheels dug through the gravel ballast, throwing it aside like a snow plow.

Inside the cab, Long and Block hung on for dear life as the derailed locomotive slid, jittering up and down like an out-of-balance clothes dryer. Long had the presence of mind to shove the throttle closed, and may have even pulled the brakes back into emergency, not that either made much difference by then. The two of them had to have known what had just happened,, and they had to have known that hitting the derailer meant that the Home signal was at Stop.

Behind them the tender, then the cars and coaches hit the derailer just as suddenly, and also started slamming across the ties as 8306 dragged them forward...the train was slowing, but nowhere near quickly enough. Everything remained coupled together...at first, anyway...then something strange happened.

8306 ripped across the turn-out for the passing siding, tearing it up, then, a hundred or so feet and a couple of seconds later, slammed through the diamond. In the cab, the manic jittering suddenly smoothed out as the diamond's 'frogs' grabbed the locomotive's wheels and yanked them back onto the rails...I can't help but wonder if either Block or Long glanced out of the cab's right side window to see the NYC locomotive's headlight bearing down on them as they hurtled through the crossing. With the throttle closed, 8306 was just coasting, still moving at around 30 miles per hour, after the diamond rerailed it, slowing as it's momentum petered out, finally rolling to a stop about 400 feet beyond the diamond.. 

The tender, baggage car, smoking car and first coach all slammed through the derailer and bounced along the ties, uncoupling from each other and moving at their own speed as they did so. The baggage car bounced across the ties for a shade over 300 feet, shuddering to a stop 75 feet behind the locomotive while the smoking car derailed, jolting over both rails and loosing it's forward truck as the car angled across both Michigan Central tracks, stopping almost 200 feet behind the baggage car and only 35 feet beyond the crossing. 

The passengers aboard The Canadian's first day coach knew something was bad wrong when they were suddenly thrown forward, into the seat ahead of them as the car lurched across the derailer and shuddered across the ties, turning their fast, smooth trip rough and noisy. Ahead of them, the tender, baggage car, and smoking car derailed, separated, and stopped beyond the diamond. The first coach shuddered to a stop just behind and maybe even resting against the smoking car, derailed and sitting on the diamond, dead across the New York Central tracks. The interior of the coach was washed with light, and the passengers turned, wide-eyed and horrified to stare at 4828's oncoming headlight. They only had a second or so to contemplate their fate...

This photo's looking west, up the New York Central tracks toward the Porter interlocking tower, and the diamond crossing, with the Michigan Central tracks passing left to right mid-screen. The blue arrow shows the direction of travel of The Interstate Express, as well as the track it was on, while the yellow arrow shows the direction of travel of the Michigan Central's The Canadian. Wagner Road crosses the NYC tracks in the immediate foreground, it also crossed the Michigan Central tracks out of frame to the right (North) Both trains were blowing for the Wagner Road crossings as they approached the diamond, which is what very likely alerted both Whitehead and Cook, in the tower, and the crew of the freight train that was sitting on the Michigan Central passing siding of the impending disaster.

The Michigan Central crossed the NYC at about a 45 degree angle, which is why the tower sits at an angle. The Michigan Central Horne Signal, which The Canadian's crew disregarded and ran, would be off frame to the left, but if you look at the left side of the tower, and look at the left side of the roof, just to the left of that multi-line utility pole, you'll see a semaphore signal, set to stop. That is the train order signal that George Block says he probably mistook for the Home signal...the night of the wreck, this signal was green. The ICC stated that it absolutely was possible to mistake the Train Order signal for the Home signal, but that wasn't as good of an excuse as you might think...I go into why towards the end of the post.

The crossing and interlocking tower were spotlighted in 4828's headlight beam as the big Pacific class blew past the green NYC home signal, then roared across the Wagner Road crossing. Just about the time they crossed Wagner Road, less than 300 feet from the diamond, both Johnston and Deland went pale, their eyes snapping wide open in shock, as Michigan Central locomotive 8306 suddenly hurtled into view, spotlighted as if on stage, bouncing as it shuddered across the ties. 8306 jolted as it rerailed on the diamond, then swept off of the crossing and out of view, dragging it's tender and the baggage car behind it, with the smoking car and first coach following. 

Johnston grabbed for the brake handle...ahead of them, time seemed to suddenly downshift and move in slow motion...he slammed the brake handle back into 'EMERGENCY', at the same time shoving the throttle closed.  As he shoved the throttle forward, closing it, and reached desperately for the Johnson bar to reverse the locomotive, he and George Deland watched the baggage car detach from the tender, then the smoking car behind it uncouple and heave sideways, both cars throwing gravel aside as they plowed ahead, jolting across the diamond. On board The Interstate Express, the brakes grabbed and steel wheels started screaming against steel rails.

The Canadian's first coach lumbered awkwardly onto the crossing, smacked the smoking car, and shuddered to a stop, maybe a hundred feet directly ahead of them. They didn't have a chance in hell of even getting slowed down, much less getting stopped.

In the tower, Whitehead and Cook scrambled between the work desk and the row of levers, trying desperately to make it to and out of the door and down the outside steps before the collision pounded debris through the tower windows. The was a concert of horror outside as steel wheels screamed against rails, and The Canadian's wheels pounded across ties, with the manic chuffing of the two big locomotives merging to provide accompaniment. One of the men may have glanced back just in time to see the horrible image of 4828's headlight shining through the C.P. day coach's windows as the coach shudder-stopped on the crossing, dead-in-front of the onrushing locomotive. They weren't going to make it to the door.

'Hit the floor!!!' The two men dived to the floor, hugging the floorboards at the same instant a crunching shuddering crash assaulted their ears, followed all but instantly by shattering glass and a cacophony of ricocheting wood as several windows on the south side of the tower exploded inward.

 If you took a ceramic coffee mug, tossed it in the air, and smacked it with a hard-swung baseball bat, you'd get a pretty good approximation of what happened to the central 30 feet or so of the coach when it grenaded violently as 4828 slammed into it, turning into pieces of wooden shrapnel that bombarded the south wall of the tower, shattering the windows and sending jagged glass projectiles across the room as wooden pieces of coach ricocheted off the walls and bounced across the floor.

Those wooden Canadian Pacific 1500 series day coaches were seventy-two feet long with a capacity of seventy-two passengers, and CP coach #1560's seats were filled to a bit over-capacity, with possibly as many as 80 people aboard when 4828 slammed into and through it just about dead center. The coach came apart explosively as 4828 slammed it off of the track, the steel underframe bending almost double before snapping like a twig, the big six wheeled trucks tumbling across the ground like a pair of boulders tossed by a giant, turning the wheel sets into huge and deadly flying dumbbells. The front third or so of the coach tumbled and rolled for well over a hundred feet, shedding parts and passengers...both dead, injured and even uninjured...as it did so, finally stopping, in pieces, nearly two hundred feet beyond the crossing. The middle third or so just suddenly and violently ceased to exist, while the back third spun away from the collision, shedding shattered sections of sidewall and roof, ending up in a heap at the base of the tower.

 Over thirty people were violently ejected, with over half of them carried along by 4828 as it tore through the coach...at least twenty of them ended up either in front of the locomotive or under it, and died instantly and almost as many were horribly injured and wouldn't survive the night.

 The collision kicked the locomotive hard to the right, off of the track, and that one hundred plus tons of steel actually caught a tiny bit of air as it pounded sideways across the rails and tilted downward hard off of the track. The locomotive's pilot threw a bow wave of dirt aside as it slammed into the ground next to the track, digging deeply into the earth and gouging out a ten foot deep, twenty or so foot long crater as the front end of the locomotive stopped almost instantly.

 The back end and tender, however, were still moving at 50 miles per hour or more, and momentum wanted them to continue to do so. The locomotive whipped around 180 degrees in less than an eye-blink, bending steel rails into pretzel shapes, turning ties into projectiles, and sending a deadly hail storm of ballast stones flying, before slamming over on it's left side. 

In 4828's cab, all Claus Johnston and George Deland could do was hang on for the ride, and sadly, it wouldn't be a ride that they would survive. I don't know of they ended up under the overturned locomotive or if they were ejected and hit the ground with fatal force, but both men died in the wreck. 

 The tender was yanked around like the end kid in an extreme game of snap-the-whip, and for just an instant the rest of the train was yanked along as well, until the coupling between tender and horse car snapped like a rotten twig an instant before the connections and coupling between tender and locomotive ripped loose, and the tender was thrown, almost like a 60 ton shot-putt, beyond the locomotive as it slammed around, ending up turned 90 degrees, just beyond the overturned locomotive. The horse car bounced along the ties for another hundred and fifty feet or so before slamming off of the track and across the east-bound NYC track as well as the NYC passing siding, while the three cars behind it, derailed and uncoupled, shuddered to a stop, tilted and zig-zagged, but intact. The rest of the train stayed on the rails.

**

NYC Locomotive 4828, overturned and pointing back in the direction from which it came the morning after the wreck. You're looking east, up the NYC main line, with the Porter Interlocking Tower visible on the left side of the frame. When the locomotive whipped around after derailing and digging into the ground, it tore the tracks up as well, tearing out a good hundred feet or so of track, and carrying it along for the ride...some of that track is also visible in the foreground of this shot. At the same time it was ripping up the NYC main line, the out-of-control locomotive also damaged a wye track connecting the Michigan Central and NYC main lines.

Sadly, and as of yet unbeknown to the recovery crews when this pic was taken, the bodies of several passengers as well as Engineer Claus Johnston, and Fireman George Deland were underneath the wrecked locomotive.

Another shot of 4828, taken from about the same angle as the  first pic, but from a bit further back. with the tower in the background, and 4828's derailed tender right mid-frame. The tender probably weighed in at least forty or fifty tons, yet it got dragged around, then tossed beyond the locomotive as if it was made of balsawood and cardboard.

  One of the big wrecking cranes is partially visible at the extreme right, and it looks as if it's crew's getting ready to hook up to the tender and remove it. Look closely between the tender and crane and you can barely see one of The Interstate Express' derailed coaches, while one of The Canadian's coaches is visible at the extreme left, beyond the tower. 

The wreckage visible in the foreground is part of the front third or so of Canadian Pacific coach 1560, which 4828 destroyed when it tore through it. The body of the coach was reduced to splinters and fragments, and the steel frame was bent double and snapped in two, with part of it tossed nearly 200 feet...you can see part of the frame in the extreme foreground of this shot.

I really wish this pic was better quality than it is, because there's a lot going on here. This pic was taken well into the incident, and was very likely taken from the second floor of the tower. The overturned Locomotive 4828 is visible center-left in the frame, with the tender just beyond it, turned 90 degrees, and one of the NYC's ginormous wrecking cranes working on removing the tender. Righting and rerailing the wrecked locomotive would likely be the last task for the wreckers, and it very likely...I'll go as far as saying definitely...took two of them to handle the job.

Note the huge amount of wreckage between the locomotive and the left edge of the frame...ALL of that's from the destroyed daycoach, which pretty much disintegrated when 4828 slammed into and through it...the central thirty feet or so of the coach was reduced to splinters. One end of the coach was thrown nearly two hundred feet beyond the crossing, you can just barely make out that wreckage right mid-frame, to the right of the crane and left of the first utility pole.

Also note the destroyed track. That's a wye track that connected the NYC and Michigan Central. The NYC and Michigan Central main lines were also torn up, the Michigan Central worse than the NYC because of  the Michigan Central locomotive and two of it's cars running on the ties for nearly six hundred feet. The NYC main line was torn up in the vicinity of the crossing, damaged by locomotive 4828's spin and roll.

Track repair crews would be waiting for the wreckers to finish removing cars and wreckage so they could get to work repairing the two main lines...note the work train that the wrecking cranes coupled to the end of.  These guys hustled, big time. A Michigan Central passenger train was the first train to pass through the repaired crossing, twenty-three hours after the wreck.

Another general shot of the scene, with 4828 right mid-frame. This one was probably taken form fairly close to the tower. The windowless car visible midframe, just beyond the overturned locomotive, is probably the train's baggage car...the Arms Palace Horse Car, which was the train's first car, is hidden by both the locomotive, and the work train just beyond it, derailed and slanted across all three NYC tracks (West and eastbound main lines, and passing siding).... The next car visible was one of the NYC coaches.

Note the huge amount of wreckage on the ground...all of it' from the destroyed Canadian Pacific coach, which was reduced to splinters and fragments in the collision. Two of the coach's wheelsets are visible left mid-frame, and note that the one closest to the camera's sitting tilted at an angle...that's because it's sitting in the crater that the locomotive gouged out of the ground as it hurtled off of the track and spun around.

This one's at the crossing, looking west up the NYC main line. The wreckage in the immediate foreground is from the destroyed Canadian Pacific Coach #1560, with a fragment of sidewall and part of the car's roof on the right (Just above where 'Pan Drugstore's printed) and two wheelsets to the left. This car was absolutely devastated, and all but two of the fatalities were passengers from this car. Unbelievably and verging on miraculously, though, a few of the car's passengers escaped injury. The derailed car partially visible  at extreme right center of the frame is a smoking car, which the destroyed coach very likely hit as it lumbered through the crossing, while the intact car left center is a sleeping car. The car visible end-on is probably the fourth NYC car, which was a coach.

You can see how close the crossing was to the tower here...the crossing itself is actually about mid-frame, and the photographer was standing about forty or fifty feet from it, the two cars to the sides of the frame are roughly in line with the Michigan Central track, and to the left and right of the crossing. When the wooden daycoach grenaded as 4828 slammed through it, it threw wooden shrapnel ahead and to the sides for a hundred feet or more. Every window on this side of the tower's first floor as well as several on the second floor were broken, and a couple of holes were even punched in the siding. Of course, it could have been even wore...4828 made it past the tower before hurtling of the track, to the right, and whipping around. Had it gone off the track at the instant it hit the coach, it would have slammed through the tower, destroying it, and probably adding Whitehead and Cook...the two men working the tower,,,to the list of fatalities

This one was taken well into the recovery process, apparently, and to be honest I don't have a clue exactly where on the scene it was taken from. If I had to make a guess, I'd say it's looking south, down the Michigan Central tracks, towards the crossing, and that's the end of the derailed smoking car. angled across both Michigan Central mainline tracks, you're looking at. The tower would be in the right, center background, hidden behind the smoking car. The derailed, tilted car to the right is probably the sleeping car that was also visible to the right of the frame in the photo above this one. The coach visible to the left would be one of he NYC coaches, and it appears one of the big wrecking cranes is working to rerail it.

One thing that's notable in all of these pics is the number of spectators who were right on top of the action, something that just absolutely wouldn't happen today...if you aren't Fire, Law Enforcement, railroad personnel, or one of the Federal 'alphabet' response agencies (EPA, NTSB, etc), you won't get with-in a quarter mile or so of a similar scene today. Back then, though, it was not only allowed, it was all but expected. A train wreck in town was actually considered entertainment and I can guarantee that, as those big cranes worked, there were dozens of wide-eyed young boys watching in wonderment. And yes, playing hookie from school may have been involved for that to happen.

Credit for all of the above images to the the blog 'Porter County's Past: An Amateur Historian's Perspective', also on Blogger. 

**

Often the seconds immediately following a major disaster are described as 'Several seconds of eerie silence', but that definitely wasn't the case in Porter that evening. Steam was roaring from the split seams on 4828's boiler, then M.C. locomotive 8306's safety valve let go, adding to the din. In 8306's cab, W.S. Long and George Block had a busy several minutes, closing the throttle and banking the fire, but the main thing I have a feeling they were doing was getting their story straight...they had just caused a major accident, and they knew it.

By some absolute miracle, both locomotive and tender missed the tower as they whipped and spun off of the tracks, leaving it shrapnel-damaged but intact, and it's two occupants shaken but uninjured. In the tower, Whitehead and Cook raised themselves off of the floor, then stood and looked out of the shattered windows...they had a birds-eye view of the wreckage, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if one or both voiced a horrified 'Holy Mother of God' or similar prayer as they gazed over the shattered wreckage and scattered coaches, half hidden by steam and smoke. Small flickering's were lighting up the steam and smoke clouds as small fires...likely started by burning coal from 4828's fire box, and thankfully not spreading quickly...erupted in the wreckage of the day coach.

The two of them were also likely amazed that they were still alive and that the tower was still standing... 4828 had just missed the tower as it derailed and whipped around. Had it hit the structure, the tower would have been instantly reduced to a pile of kindling, with them somewhere in the middle of the wreckage. They didn't ponder on this miracle for more than a second or two, though. Cook, who's primary role was telegraph operator, headed for the telegraph key, while Whitehead picked up the phone...by another miracle, both phone and telegraph lines escaped damage. Both men started pounding out messages or dialing, reporting the wreck and requesting help.

As our two towermen started getting the cavalry en-route, the brakemen  aboard The Canadian and The Interstate Express, probably assisted by the crew of the freight, grabbed lanterns and flares and trotted up the tracks to stop any trains approaching the scene before an even more horrible disaster could occur. In the tower, Whitehead and Cook may have tried to set the signals to neutral...stop on all tracks...but couldn't. The wreck had also destroyed the pipes, rods and levers controlling the signals. 

They were able to get the aforementioned phone calls and telegraph messages out, though, and stations up and down both the NYC and MC main lines were setting signals to stop to keep other trains from running into the wreckage, probably almost before our brakemen could get into position. Hard on the heels of the order to stop all trains were requests for both medical help and heavy equipment, likely both from the tower, and the near-by Porter railroad station. 

Even as Cook was pounding out the telegraph messages, Whiteheads first phone calls, as he watched flames beginning to take hold in the wreckage, very likely went to Porter's and Chesterton's volunteer fire companies. Mere minutes after the crash Porter's house siren, in a cupola on the roof of the town hall/fire station less than a mile away on Franklin Street, wound up the scale and screamed into the cold evening air. Then, as if in answer, Chesterton's house siren, on that small town's town hall a a mile to the south and east, also started wailing.  With-in minutes, more sirens were screaming the arrival of both towns' rigs.

Porter's crew caught a hydrant in front of the post office on Lincoln street, less than 300 feet from the scene, stretched lines, and quickly had the fires under control as Chesterton's crew rolled in to assist. Uninjured passengers from both trains climbed out of the coaches, with many of them trying to help the injured who lay moaning on the debris-covered ground.

Townspeople were also showing up, both 'Lookie-Loos' and people looking to help, and a semi organized effort to locate the injured and dead immediately got underway. Lanterns were secured, from the trains, railroad depot and the fire rigs, and volunteer firefighters, railroad employees, and townspeople grouped up, and quickly devised, implemented and executed a plan to search the area.

Meanwhile, in the cities of LaPorte, Michigan City, Gary, and Chicago, people were scrambling, as trains between those cities and Porter, stopped due to the wreck, were quickly shunted onto passing sidings. A relief train from Michigan City, 13 miles east of Porter on The Michigan Central, carrying doctors, nurses, medical supplies, light rescue tools, and possibly even a generator and lights, was the first to roll, and the first to arrive. At a shade after 7 PM, people on the scene heard the train blowing for crossings east of Porter, and the headlight could be seen approaching down the long straight-a-way east of the scene. At 7:10 PM, the relief train eased to a stop just east of the wreck, airbrakes hissing, and a group of doctors and nurses quickly disembarked, grabbing equipment and medical bags while other crewman unloaded stretchers from a baggage car.

I have a sneakin' suspicion one of the relief train's cars was a flat car with a big generator permanently mounted along with cable reels and big lights...by 1921 portable generators (Well, engine-powered generators small enough to be mounted on a flat car) were in existence, and my bet is the train had barely stopped before the Ford Model T engine that all but inevitably powered the generator popped into life, and men were pulling cable off of the reels hand over hand and dragging the ends across the debris-filled landscape, then plugging them into big kettle-lights. Less than ten minutes after the train hissed to a stop, the scene was lit up like daylight, and doctor/nurse teams were kneeling next to injured passengers.

It didn't take more than another five or so minutes for them to figure out that (1) they had a lot of patients, (2) Many of them had suffered grievous injuries, and (3) treating them in the field just wasn't going to work. A quick pow-wow was held between the just arrived medical team  and town officials, and it was decided to transport the injured to either the Post Office, or the train station, while the fire station/town hall was likely designated as a temporary morgue. Wagons or trucks were procured, the patients loaded on board, and the short journeys to either location made, with the makeshift ambulances making multiple trips...and the folding canvas stretchers likely getting used multiple times...until all of the injured were transported.

I don't know what criteria was used to decide what patients went where, but I do know that the patients were triaged at the scene, with the worst injured going to one place (Probably the Post Office, as it was the closest), and the lesser injured going to the train station...being close to the tracks, they had best access to the railroad, and transportation into Chicago to a hospital.

 There were around eighty passengers aboard the destroyed day coach, and twenty were killed instantly, leaving sixty potential patients, and I have a feeling the great majority of them suffered some kind of injury, though two or three, miraculously, escaped unscathed.  Fifteen of the injured were grievously injured, and wouldn't survive until morning, and may not even have survived transport to one of the facilities pressed into service in Porter, much less a trip into Chicago. 

The rest of the passengers aboard the destroyed coach suffered injuries from cuts and bruised to compound fractures...rolling up on a scene with sixty plus injured patients, with injuries ranging form moderate to serious to critical, would be a daunting task today, it was all but overwhelming that night in Porter. The doctors and nurses on scene (Who were not used to working major, or even minor, accident scenes) had to figure out who could be treated in Porter, and who needed to go to a hospital, and even decide which patients wouldn't survive transport to a hospital.

I have a feeling that the majority of the moderate and serious injuries were transported into Chicago and whether some of the coaches from the relief train were utilized, using another locomotive, or just how that task was accomplished wasn't made clear, but if the rest of the operation that night was any indication, it was handled efficiently and competently...railroads, sadly, had lots of experience handling major wrecks by 1921.

As for the dead, bodies were already being found, all of them terribly mangled and many of them beheaded. They were likely wrapped in shrouds, also loaded onto wagons, and transported to the temporary morgue at the fire station.

Mention was also made of some patients being transported to an undertaker's facility for further treatment...I can see that, the room where bodies were embalmed could double as an operating room in an emergency.  This is very likely where the worst injured were ultimately taken. These patients wouldn't have survived transport into Chicago, and sadly, didn't survive the night, making the choice of a funeral home as a makeshift hospital unintentionally and eerily on-point.

Wrecking trains from both railroads started rolling in a couple of hours after the wreck, and crews started sizing up just what they'd have to do to get the lines cleared and trains rolling. Spoiler alert...they had a long, long day and night ahead of them, and they apparently hustled big time, because the first train to pass through the newly repaired crossing...a Michigan Central passenger train...rolled through sometime around 5:30 PM on February 28th...23 hours after the wreck.

Preliminary work was started soon after the crews arrived, and ultimately they had at least two, and possibly three of the huge, steam powered wrecking cranes in operation, punching smoke columns skyward as they righted and retracked the cars...the biggest jobs, righting locomotive 4828, and retracking the derailed passenger cars, was likely scheduled for the morning, when they'd have daylight on their side, and could see what they were doing.

When 4828 was righted...a job that likely required two of the big wrecking cranes to accomplish...they made a truly macabre discovery. At least ten, and possibly more bodies were found beneath the overturned locomotive, all of them badly mutilated. I'm making an assumption here, that this was also when the bodies of engineer Claus Johnston and fireman George Deland were found.

New York Central Locomotive 4828 after being righted the day after the wreck. The front of the locomotive is towards the right side of the frame, the rear...cab...end to the left. The locomotive was a 4-6-2 Pacific, with a four wheeled bogie truck beneath the front steam cylinders, and a two wheeled truck beneath the cab, it lost both the front and rear bogies in the collision and subsequent spin and roll-over, while the cab was likely torn away when the wrecking cranes righted the locomotive.

The locomotive was kicked to the right, off of the track, as it tore through the wooden passenger coach, and the pilot...called the 'cowcatcher' by kids of yore...dug hard into the ground next to the track. The front of the locomotive dug a ten foot deep, twenty or so foot long crater in the ground before coming to a quick stop, the back end kept moving at about 35 miles per hour, whipping around 180 degrees to the left...clockwise...in an eyeblink before slamming over on it's left side. As it spun, the locomotive tore up tracks, turned railroad ties and ballast stones into projectiles, and tossed the tender like a shotput...all but literally.

The tender ripped loose from the rest of the train, but stayed with the locomotive for part of the spin before tearing loose. After breaking away from the locomotive, the tender was 'shot-putted' ahead of the dying behemoth, turning 90 degrees as it was tossed a good thirty or forty feet to end up beyond the overturned locomotive, turned at a near right angle to the track 

 Engineer Claus Johnston and Fireman George Deland were both either ejected as the locomotive whipped around, or trapped beneath it as it slammed over onto it's side, and both, sadly, died in the wreck. Even worse, the bodies of several of the passengers from the destroyed passenger coach were carried along by the locomotive as it tore through the coach and hurtled off of the track, and their badly mangled bodies were found beneath the locomotive when it was righted.

As for the fate of 4828, I couldn't find anything, but I have a feeling it was scrapped.

Once the locomotive was out of the hole, and rerailed, where it couldn't endanger the crews recovering the bodies, work had to stop while the bodies were recovered and removed to the temporary morgue. The likely long, drawn out, and difficult effort to identify bodies began then, and it absolutely couldn't have been easy. These bodies were badly mangled, many of them beheaded, and few could be identified by looking at the bodies alone. The men had wallets, but you have to remember that drivers licenses weren't that common in 1921. Few states actually required them (Only 39 by 1935, a decade and a half later), and none of the states that did require licenses issued photo-IDs. 

Personal effects were used for most of the IDs...I found little to no info on the process, or the process of notifying relatives, and releasing bodies of the deceased to loved ones, but it's safe to say it was a particularly heart-wrenching affair that likely took the better part of a week or more.

Once the derailed cars and wrecked locomotive were back on the rails, they were probably moved to one of the passing sidings so the work of repairing the track could begin in earnest. There were several hundred feet of track, along with the signaling rods, that had to be completely rebuilt. Crews had to remove the twisted rails and shattered ties, lay new ballast, then lay new track, which had to be properly aligned, both vertically and horizontally, with the existing track. This was hard, back-breaking labor that also required no small amount of skill, and again, these guys were flat out hustling to get the crossing open again in just under 24 hours. 

Of course, our relief and wrecking crews weren't the only ones notified and dispatched to the scene. Brass from both railroads as well as an investigative team from the Interstate Commerce Commission (Forerunner to today's NTSB) were notified early in the ballgame, and headed for Porter, most of them coming from Chicago, only forty or so miles away, and arriving close behind the wrecking trains. 

Here, of course, is one (Of many) way things have changed drastically in the last century and small change...today, wreckage stays in place until the NTSB examines it, with rescue of victims and fire-fighting/hazard mitigation being the only reasons anything can be disturbed. In Porter on that evening in 1921, however, wreckage clearing and track repairs kicked off as soon as crews rolled onto the scene. I can't help but wonder if this interfered with the investigation to some extent.

The next day, February 28th, the County Coroner convened a coroners jury. Unfortunately, very little information was available concerning this jury, it's make-up, or the testimony they heard. We do know that they recorded an official death toll of thirty-seven, meaning that 4828 had been righted and the bodies beneath the locomotive, along with the remains of Claus Johnston and George Deland, had been recovered by the time the jury convened. The final, official death toll being recorded by the Coroner's Jury also meant, of course, that several of the injured passengers passed away over-night. We also know that all thirty-seven deaths were found to be caused by the collision of Locomotive 4828 with the passenger coach, and that the collision was likely caused by the Michigan Central crew running a red signal. 

It wasn't even close to over when the Coroner's Jury adjourned...as that group was hearing testimony, officials from the Interstate Commerce Commission and both railroads were all figuratively licking their chops, waiting to got hold of 8306's crew, along with everyone else with any information about the wreck. My bet is it was a long long couple of days.

We can pretty much bet that everyone gave the same basic testimony in all four hearings...the Coroners Jury, both railroads, and the I.C.C....so to avoid both duplication of effort and boring you guys silly, I'll only go over it once...the testimony given to the ICC Investigators. 

I'm thinking the ICC crew also came from Chicago, as they got there early in the ball-game as well, and they immediately began gathering evidence, taking measurements, and getting statements, but they also began interviewing anyone and everyone who had any connection to the wreck. The tower crew, 8306's crew, the crew of the freight train, the conductors of both trains...

Almost everyone testified that the home signal was red, and that the Michigan Central train blew through it at somewhere north of 50 MPH without even slacking up, not stopping until it hit the derailer and slid through the diamond, putting the day coach in front of the on-rushing NYC train. Note I said almost everyone. I think we can all figure out whose story was different.

Both Engineer W.S. Long and Fireman George Block swore that the Home signal was green...or at least that they saw a green light where the home signal should have been. Block also testified that, as they got closer to the crossing, he lost sight of the signal due to the smoke and steam from the freight locomotive, and assumed that the same indications still stood as they approached the crossing. 

Speaking of the freight train, and specifically of it's crew, what of the two brakemen who were frantically signaling the oncoming Canadian, and had to dive clear as it blew by them? Neither Long or Block ever saw them, according to their testimony. Block, in fact, stated that he was busily stoking the firebox as they approached the crossing, leaving Long to watch for the signals on his own, and the engineer testified that he never saw even a glimpse of the freight train crew, or their wildly swinging lanterns.

One of the many sad things about the wreck is the fact that Engineer Long started to do the right thing...when his fireman called the Distant signal as being set to caution, Long throttled back and applied the brakes, bleeding off around 15 MPH, slowing them to somewhere between 30 and 40 MPH. But then, when Block mistakenly called the home signal as green, he opened the throttle back up and gained those 15 Miles Per back, plus some. The Canadian was flat out strolling when it when it blew through the Home signal. It was definitely going faster than 50. 

How do I know this?  Lets take a look.

First a few known and established facts of the time, speed, and distance variety. The NYC's speed limit for passenger trains passing through a diamond crossing was 50 mph.  Next...the annunciator circuits that sound the buzzer or bell in the tower to announce that a train is approaching the crossing are not equidistant from the tower. Both circuits are around two miles from the tower, with the NYC circuit about 1000 feet further from the tower than the Michigan Central circuit, so if the two trains were just about equidistant from the crossing as they approached, the NYC train would, hit the buzzer first, followed several seconds later by the Michigan Central train, just as it, in fact, did.

'If you play the old 'If Train A was going fifty miles per hour...' word problem game, you realize that The Canadian was probably slightly closer to the tower than The Interstate Express when The New York Central train hit the buzzer. They had to have been. Otherwise, when Long slowed to 35 MPH, the Interstate Express would have pulled ahead of The Canadian, so to speak, and reached the crossing first. The Canadian wouldn't have been able to close that distance...When Long opened the throttle up, and regained his speed, the Interstate Express would have been too far ahead, and the difference in speeds too little for The Canadian  to catch back up.

Remember, the annunciator circuit on the NYC track was 1000 feet further from the tower than the one on the Michigan Central track, meaning it was 1000 feet closer to the NYC train than the one on the Michigan central tracks was to The Canadian as they approached the crossing, so if both trains were moving at about the same speed...even if The Canadian was slightly ahead of The Interstate Express...the Express would hit it's buzzer first and the signals would be set to give it the right of way.

And this is exactly what happened, and had all been well with the world, George Block would've called the Distant signal at caution, W. S. Long would have slowed by fifteen mph, then Block would have confirmed that the Home signal was red, and Long would have slowed further, ready to stop if The Interstate Express was still rolling through the crossing as they eased up to it.

But, of course, all wasn't well with the world that day. Somewhere during the quarter to a half minute and 1000 feet or so of travel after The Canadian hit it's buzzer, Block called the caution signal, they slowed by fifteen Miles per, allowing The Interstate Express to close the difference in distance between the two trains and the crossing, then Block saw and called what he thought was the Home signal as green, and Long sped back up,. Therefore, when Engineer Long dragged the throttle open and sped back up, the two trains were almost exactly equidistant from the crossing. Then The Canadian pulled ahead again and was the first train to reach the crossing, by several seconds.

Which meant that, if The Interstate Express was running at the NYC's 50 MPH speed limit for diamond crossings as it approached the crossing, The Canadian was probably making at least 55-60 mph...or better...when it hit the derailer and slid through the diamond several seconds before the NYC train reached the crossing, with violent and tragic results.

The cause of the wreck, in I.C.C. speak, was pretty obvious and straight-forward...the engineer and fireman of Michigan Central Locomotive 8306, heading up that railroad's Train # 20, The Canadian, missed...or ignored...the red home signal, blew past it, and fouled the crossing. And NYC Locomotive 4828, heading up NYC Train # 151, The Interstate Express, entered the crossing on the green, and broadsided them...specifically slamming into Canadian Pacific Daycoach 1560, resulting in the complete disintegration of that coach and the deaths of 35 passengers, as well as 4828's engineer and fireman.

The ICC had a report ready within two months (Try and get a full NTSB report of a major incident in less than a year today) and they stated pretty specifically nearly exactly what I typed above, with fewer adjectives and adverbs, and less...well, verby...verbs. Long ran the red and put his train smack dab in front of The Interstate Express. What we don't know...and may never know...is why.

We don't know why, but we do know that W.S Long had not been a particularly good boy. He had amassed seven write-ups and suspensions in his thirty year career, all of them with-in last two decades before the wreck:

Long entered service with the Michigan Central as a fireman in 1890, was promoted to yard engineman later that year. He was later promoted to road engineman in 1901. The following entries are included in Long's service record with the Michigan Central Railroad:

• October, 1901, suspended 10 days for running off interlocking signals against him.

• September, 1907, suspended 10 days for failure to stop for telegraph signal not burning.

• December, 1907, suspended 10 days for failure to stop for block signal not burning.

• February, 1909, taken out of service on account of defective vision.

• June, 1909, restored to service on account of improved vision.

• April 1, 1914, observed surprise test; light out on telegraph signal.

• April 28, 1918, record suspension 30 days; collided with caboose car, flag out.

George Block, who had worked for the Michigan Central for six years, only had a single suspension, but it was a biggie when you put it into the context of the Porter collision....just shy of two years earlier, in April of 1919, he had been suspended for 30 days, later amended to a reprimand without loss of time, for disregarding a stop signal.

 Yep, you read that right. He missed a stop signal. So there was a bit of history of carelessness, recklessness, or just plain long laziness shared between them.

That tendency apparently reared it's ugly head on the night of the wreck...Both of them had...and missed...a slew of chances to not run the Home signal in Porter that night.

The Distant signal was at caution...if the Distant signal was indicating 'Caution', that would mean the Home signal was at red...STOP. That's the way the things worked. He would have had to slow to 35 or so and maintain that speed if the Home signal actually had been green when George Block called it, and that wasn't impossible...had The Interstate Express been moving a little faster, and had The Canadian been a couple of minutes later, the Express could well have been in the crossing when The Canadian passed the Distant signal, and cleared it by the time they were with-in sight of the Home signal.. Had that happened, and the Home signal been green, Long still would have had to maintain a reduced speed until he could confirm that the Home signal was green, because the Distant signal was yellow when they passed it.

  The night of the wreck, after his fireman called the home signal as green, Long absolutely should have maintained a reduced speed until he could confirm that the Home signal was green, or see that it was actually red and stop.

 If, when W.S. Long backed off to 35 or so MPH at the yellow Distant signal, he had maintained that speed...which is what they were supposed to have done...they would have very likely seen The Interstate Express crossing the diamond as they approached, and had plenty of time to stop. In fact, it's quite possible that the NYC train would have cleared the crossing as they were approaching it, and they would have watched the Home signal go from 'Stop' to 'Clear Track (Red to green). But of course, The Canadian didn't maintain a reduced speed, instead speeding back up...

And finally, the freight train crew tried everything within their power, actually putting their own lives at risk, to try and signal The Canadian's crew to stop, only to be ignored. Both Long and Block stated that they never even saw the two brakemen.

So just why did both W S Long and George Block miss all these chances not to cause a catastrophic train wreck. The I.C.C. tackled this very question.

The Home signal was on a twenty or so foot mast, or very possibly a pair of masts, with one on each side of the track. This mast (Or masts) was/were located 366 feet west of the crossing. Train Order signals, which were also mast-mounted semaphore signals that looked very similar to the Home and Distant signals, were used to inform engineers that they needed to stop to get new train orders, so they would have been close to...often right next to...either the tower or depot. The train order signal in Porter was located hard by southwest corner of the tower...nearly four hundred feet from the Home signal.

The go-to explanation provided by George Block was that he mistook the train-order signal for the Home signal, adding that the Home signal was also obscured by steam and smoke drifting over from the freight locomotive on the passing siding. Interestingly enough, the investigation didn't disprove the fireman's excuse...but that still didn't let either he or W.S. Long off of the hook. 

The I.C.C. investigators decided to test Block's excuse. They made arrangements to procure a similar locomotive to Michigan Central 8306, and ran it towards the diamond from the same direction, at the same time of evening, as The Canadian approached from on the night of the accident, with one of their own in the cab observing the signals, which were set exactly as they had been the night of the wreck. 

 Our cab-riding I.C.C. investigator found, and the I.C.C. report noted, that it was possible for the train order signal at Porter to be confused with the home signal at night, especially if the Home signal was obscured by steam or smoke...a condition that wasn't all that uncommon due to the location of the watering standpipe on the Michigan Central passing siding, On top of that, they concluded that the Home signal very possibly was obscured on the night of the wreck. 

If you're thinking this cleared the Michigan Central engineer and fireman, you'd be wrong. This wasn't as good of an excuse as you might think, and it certainly didn't pull Long's proverbial fat out of the equally proverbial fire...we'll get into why in a bit.

During the day, the I.C.C. report noted, it would have been all but impossible to confuse the two, because the crew in the cab of a locomotive approaching the crossing would be able to see which mast the signal they were observing was mounted on, so if the Home signal was obscured during the day, while the Train Order signal was visible...well that's just it. Our engineer would be able to see that the Home signal was obscured and the train order signal wasn't, and would be required, by regulation, to slow or even stop until he could ascertain the Home signal's indication,..

 At night, however, especially when viewed from a distance, it could possibly be a different story. It wouldn't be at all implausible for our engineer and/or fireman to peer ahead of the locomotive from a half mile or so out, see a green light, and assume (Despite that age old saying about what Assuming does to You and Me) that it was the home signal that he was seeing, and that it was showing a clear track. But that's still no excuse.

If the Distant Signal was at caution, the Home signal was assumed to be at Stop. Michigan Central Railroad Policy stated that, that upon passing the Distant signal set to Caution, the engineer must slow to a speed that allowed him to safety stop prior to the diamond. Pretty simple and straight-forward. If the Distant signal said 'Caution, the Home signal said 'stop'. You slowed to a speed that allowed you to stop before reaching the diamond, and when you reached that red home signal, you stopped.

What, however, if if our locomotive crew saw the distant signal at caution, then saw a green light that they thought was the home signal? The rules, regulations, and S.O.P.s had that covered, too.  If there was any question what-so-ever as to the Home signals indication, the engineer was, again, required to slow to a speed that allowed him to safety stop prior to the diamond and maintain that speed, or indeed, stop if need be, until he could confirm that the home signal was green. (Or, of course, stay stopped if it was red.)

Seeing a green light near the diamond when the distant signal was glowing yellow at them absolutely should have raised a question or two, just as knowing that there was a train order signal near the tower as well as the Home signal almost four hundred feet closer to them should have raised their caution level. What they actually should have been seeing was two lights, one ahead of the other, and on the night of the wreck, as The Canadian approached the diamond, the signals should have been showing red (Home Signal), then green (Train Order signal). But George Block only saw one light, and he never questioned what he saw, simply telling Long that he had a clear track. 

And the sad thing is, Long did slow down initially...but instead of maintaining 30-35 mph and easing up to a point where they could confirm the Home Signal's indication (Or, indeed, see The Interstate Express crossing in front of them, as it would have reached the crossing first had Long not sped back up) Long accepted the signal indication George Block called to him, and resumed The Canadian's 60mph or so cruising speed. And neither of them, apparently questioned the home signal's actual indication, much less took any steps to confirm it. They were running between 55 and 60 and still accelerating when they blew by the red Home signal with out even glancing at it. 

As to why they didn't see the brakemen from the freight trying desperately to flag them down...that one just defies explanation. George Block stated that he was busy stoking the firebox, but I have a sneaking suspicion that New York Central locomotives were equipped with mechanical stokers by 1921. Block would have still had to have monitored the stoker's operation, but he would have also been free to look outside of the cab to look for hazards, signals...and people frantically waving lanterns trying to get them to stop.

Long apparently never looked outside 8306's cab at all, even though he was also responsible for monitoring the signals. The engineer wasn't supposed to rely solely on the Fireman calling the signals for him, and in fact, the fireman calling the signals was actually a back-up. Long missing both the signals and the frantic lantern-waving from the freight train brakeman is absolutely inexcusable.

And finally, we have what I, as well, probably, as the I.C.C., New York Central, and Michigan Central investigators, consider 'The Biggie'. W.S. Long and George Block knew that The Interstate Express was due to hit the crossing at about the same time that they were, so it should have come as absolutely no surprise that the Distant signal was set at 'Caution'. That being the case, they knew that home signal had to have been red, and W.S. Long absolutely should have followed policy and procedure, and slowed/stopped to allow The Interstate Express to pass. 

Had W.S. Long slowed to 30 or 35 MPH and rolled towards the crossing at that reduced speed, the wreck would never have happened. The Interstate Express would have cleared the crossing before they reached it, and been well on it's way to it's final destination of Chicago, the Home signal probably would have been green when they got to it, and they would have passed through the crossing safely and been enroute to Detroit. 

The Michigan Central's investigation was just as intense as...and may have even been done in  conjunction with...the I.C.C. investigation, and both came to the same conclusion. While it was possible to confuse the Home signal with the train order signal, Michigan Central rules and regulations covered just such an eventuality...seeing the Distant signal set to caution, then having the Home signal called as green, W.S. Long should have slowed or even stopped until he could absolutely ascertain the Home signal's actual indication.

It was also pretty obvious that Long hadn't been checking the signal himself, but had been counting on George Block calling the signals for him, so instead of the 'checks and balances' that would be provided by both of them checking, Long accepted the signals that his fireman called as 'gospel'. Unfortunately, when George Block made a mistake, Long accepted that as gospel as well. With tragic results.

On top of that, further proving that Long's eyes never strayed outside of 8306's cab, he and Block had both missed the two brakemen desperately trying to signal them to stop...That one I (And, likely and more importantly by far, the ICC investigators as well) really have trouble getting my mind around.

The Michigan Central accepted full responsibility for the wreck and fired both George Long and  W. S. Block very shortly after the investigation's conclusion. Interestingly, though, both the public and the press were kinder to them. No charges were pressed against the two men, and the press noted that this was a dangerous crossing to begin with, and that, despite all of the safety tech supposedly protecting it, a major wreck there was all but inevitable. And, lets be honest here, the facts pretty much proved them right. Of course, that logic becomes circular, because it was, after all, Long's and Block's error...ignoring the signals designed to prevent just such a wreck... that caused the wreck.

The I.C.C. investigation pretty much nailed the 'How' of the wreck, but they still never really touched the 'Why'...and I doubt we'll ever know.  I have my theories about what happened, though. I don't know if the two of them worked together regularly, or if this was the first time they worked together, but I have a feeling that Long...who had already shown a tendency towards carelessness over his thirty year career...was also just a bit lazy, and had no problem allowing his fireman to do most, or even all of the 'looking outside the cab' type work. 

And I think he'd been extraordinarily lucky...he hadn't been involved in a major wreck because of these tendencies, at least until that cold Indiana Sunday night. George Block had only been with the railroad for six years, but he'd already logged a suspension for missing a 'Stop' signal. I have a feeling putting the two of them in the same cab that night was a Perfect Storm of sorts. And because of that Perfect Storm, simple carelessness and laziness had claimed 37 more lives.

Both W.S. Long and George Block are long-dead, and any untold truths about the wreck's cause died with them. They actually got off easy, IMHO. Had a similar wreck, with loss of almost forty lives, occurred today, and had it been proven that the engineer had disregarded multiple 'Stop' signals to cause it, that engineer would have very likely found himself charged with, and very likely convicted of,  multiple counts of Manslaughter.

The wreck caused a push for automatic train control technology (Something I didn't realize was developed that far back to be honest),and in-cab signaling (Ditto) to be installed in locomotive cabs...unfortunately, this didn't happen quickly. In-cab signaling and Automatic Train Control didn't come into wide-spread use until the Mid-Fifties.

Let's not forget the saddest part of this wreck (And, indeed, any multiple fatality accident)...the victims. Identifying the victims of the wreck was likely a nightmare for both officials and loved ones, as all of the bodies were  badly mutilated, and many of them were decapitated. Many of the bodies had to be identified by clothing and jewelry, along with wallets carried by the men, and identification likely began with a process of elimination...literally checking the train's manifest and checking off the names of people who had survived.

While officials were struggling to identify the victims, relatives of those on board the train were calling the railroad, the cops, and anyone else who could give them information about their loved ones, while many of the uninjured (Who, after all, made up the majority of the train's surviving passengers) were tying up phone circuits to notify their own families that they were OK.

A train wreck isn't like a local disaster, with all the victims from a small, defined area. The victims hailed from fifteen cities in seven states and three Canadian provinces, and officials had to search out contact details for the relatives, then get hold of them so that proper notification could be made. Then the relatives had to arrange rail transportation to Porter, identify their loved one, or loved ones, when they arrived, then arrange transportation back home for the body.  I can only hope the railroad helped with some of this burden.

 Once the bodies were claimed and transported, no memorial was erected to them, and now, really, nothing's left in Porter to remember them by. Even the crossing itself is gone, as is the tower.

<***> The Thirty-Seven Victims <***>

<***>

The victims hailed from fifteen cities in seven states and three Canadian provinces, the furthest away being El Paso, Texas, and included seven married couples, at least one of whom left an orphaned child behind to be raised by an aunt. The youngest victim was two, the oldest sixty-nine. Three children...nine year old Pearl Cavanaugh, three year old Richard Schwier, and two year old Arthur Ekman...were among the fatalities. The little Schwier boy's mom was also killed, and, tragically, there was one other mother-child pair among the dead...Augusta Langin (No age given) and her newlywed, eighteen year old daughter Dorothy. Also, Pearl Cavanaugh's aunt, Florence See, who she was traveling with, also died in the wreck,  

In a touch of irony that was both sad, and a bit macabre, one of the married couples...The Mullers...were on the way to Michigan to arrange for transport of Friedarika Muller's brother's body back to Illinois for burial.

I've included a list of the fatalities below...note that some of the names are also hyperlinks. These link to that person's 'Find-A-Grave' page, which goes into further detail about each victim.

The victims' home towns, where they were buried, are widely scattered, and no memorial of any kind was erected in Porter, leaving their 'Find-A-Grave' pages, and the list of victims, with the links to those pages, as the only centralized memorial of any kind dedicated to them.

Hopefully, my adding the same list and links to my blog will help memorialize them as well.

New York Central Locomotive Crew

• DELAND, George - Elkhart, Indiana (fireman on New York Central train)

• • JOHNSTON, Claus - Elkhart, Indiana (age 48, engineer on New York Central train) 

  • Passengers

           ARNEY, Howard - Cleveland, Ohio (age 35)

• ARNEY, Mrs. Katherine - Cleveland, Ohio (age 35)

• BAEHR, Lillian Anderson - Michigan City, Indiana (age 28)

• BAKER, Joseph L. - El Paso, Texas (age 23)

• BEVIER, Mrs. Emma - Augusta, Michigan

• BEVIER, C. A. - Augusta, Michigan

• BALLOU, Fannie L. - Wheatfield, Illinois (age 34)

• CAIN, Peter Richard - Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada (age 34)

• CAMPBELL, Eva June - Jackson, Michigan

• CAMPBELL, William Gordon - Revelstoke, British Columbia, Canada (age 18)

• COLLINS, Justin - London, Ontario, Canada

• COLLINS, Alexis - London, Ontario, Canada

• CAVANAUGH, Pearl - Michigan City, Indiana (age 9, niece of Mrs. Ralph See)

• EKMAN, Arthur Elmer - no hometown listed (age 2)

• ENGLER, W. G. - Detroit, Michigan (age 30)

• FLEMMING, Florence Philo - Kalamazoo, Michigan

• GOLDSTEIN, Phillip H. - Detroit, Michigan (age 29)

• GOLDSTEIN, Martha - Detroit, Michigan(age 28)

• GREENWOOD, Dr. Ray E. - Kankakee, Illinois (age 28)

• HECK, Louis A. - Jackson, Michigan

• HOSKINS, Theodosia J. Mason - Chicago, Illinois

• KRAMER, Rose Henoch - Michigan City, Indiana (age 58)

• LANGIN, Augusta B. Zimmerman - Cleveland, Ohio

• LANGIN, Mrs. Dorothy H. - Cleveland, Ohio (age 18)

• LIVINGSTON, Samuel - Chicago, Illinois (age 38)

• MOSS, Mrs. Sarah - Montreal, Québec, Canada

• MULLER, John L. - Crescent City, Illinois (age 62)

• MULLER, Friedareka Kohlmetz - Crescent City, Illinois (age 48)

• SCHWEIR, Frances Retseck - Michigan City, Indiana (age 31)

• SCHWEIR, Richard - Michigan City, Indiana (age 3, son of Mrs. Fred Schweir)

• SEE, Florence A. Leffel - Michigan City, Indiana (age 38)

• VAN RIPER, Alvin H. - Michigan City, Indiana (age 69)

• VAN RIPER, Aminta May Dahlson - Michigan City, Indiana (age 55)

• WAGGONER, Lillian Johnson - no hometown listed

• WAYNE, Frank - Milwaukee, Wisconsin (age 49)

• Victim List courtesy of the blog 'Porter County's Past: An Amateur Historian's Perspective', also on Blogger. 

Emergency Response Then and Now

A Quick Take

Emergency response to major train wrecks during the first several decades of the Twentieth Century was often well organized and well orchestrated, and it wasn't the local fire departments and law enforcement agencies handling those responses. It was the railroads themselves. 

Train wrecks, as I have noted, were not uncommon in the first decades of the Twentieth Century, and by 1921, railroads had emergency response to train wrecks almost down to an art form...sadly they'd had a good bit of practice.  All of the major railroads owned several heavy duty steam powered wrecking cranes by then, and every major rail yard probably had a wreck-train already made up, sitting on a siding, ready to roll. These trains not only had the crane and the car(s) carrying that rig's support equipment, they had tool cars, and possibly a dorm car among their consist. 

Often a second train was also made up, and this train was 'First Out' on wrecks involving passenger trains. That train would be a relief train, and the consist would include several coaches, a box car or, more than likely, an older baggage car loaded with stretchers, medical supplies (Such as they were in that era), and light duty rescue tools, and very possibly a flatcar with a big permanently mounted generator and lights.  Local doctors and nurses were asked to be on-call to be notified of major wrecks, and a phone tree was likely used to notify them when a wreck occurred.

When this phone tree was activated, and our early first responders were notified of a wreck, they likely gathered at a train station, while the relief train's on-call crew responded to the yard, and a locomotive was backed in and coupled to the already made up train. The train would pull out, stop at the station, pick up our doctors and nurses, and highball towards the scene while all signals were set to give them the right-of-way and every train between the scene and the yard was shunted into a passing siding.

When they got on the scene, the MD's start triaging and treating the patients, just as they did in Porter, but we still have to keep something in mind here. Even though they did have doctors treating the patients on scene, it still wasn't definitive pre-hospital care such as we know it today. First, it would take a while to get the relief train rolling and to the scene. The relief train from Michigan City...only about fifteen miles from the scene...got to Porter in between thirty and forty minutes, and that was an awesome response time. Then, when they got there, the treatment the injured could receive was pretty limited. IV's in hospital, for example, were exceedingly rare back then, they plain long didn't happen in the field. At. All.

Generally, the patients who could be moved would be loaded onto one or more of the passenger cars on the relief train, and transported to the nearest city with a major hospital where more definitive care...again, such as it was in 1921....could be rendered, with a couple of our MDs and nurses riding along to continue monitoring the patients. 

As happened in Porter, some patients were too grievously injured to survive transport to a hospital, and a 'temporary hospital' of sorts would be set up for them somewhere near the scene. These patients would be made as comfortable as possible (And as the treatment options of the era allowed) and, sadly, more often than not died before they could be transported to another facility.

Fire departments had become part of the response to major train wrecks by the early 1920s as well, and some major cities had specially equipped rescue companies in service to handle major accidents, but I don't think little Porter, Indiana was one of them in 1921. Porter was a tiny town in 1921, boasting only around seven hundred or so citizens. I couldn't find much about the fire company's early years and what kind of rigs they ran back then, but in all likelihood, they had one or two engines, very likely built on a mid-teens or so Ford or Chevy truck...or even heavy touring car...chassis.  They responded, along with Chesterton's similarly equipped fire company, for the very reason they were originally organized for in the first place...putting the wet stuff on the red stuff.

Crews from the two fire companies quickly controlled the incipient blazes in the wreckage of the coach, and other fire department personnel assisted in the search for victims, but the fire department response was a far, far cry from what it would be even a few decades in the future, much less today.

**

Now lets jump ahead a century plus two years to the present day. Today, Porter County's 175,000 or so people are protected by fifteen volunteer fire companies. Porter and Chesterton's fire companies are both still in service and still very active. 

Both fire companies moved out of their respective towns' city halls many decades ago. The Porter volunteer Fire Department's station's been on West Beam Street...still less than a mile from the former site of the crossing...since 1991, and the company now runs as Porter County Company 9. Porter now has, at last count, 5234 citizens, nineteen of whom are PVFD members. They ran just shy of 900 calls in 2022 and man a pair of engines, a brush truck, a light duty rescue truck, and a dive rescue rig. 

Chesterton's also grown exponentially over the last century, with around 14,500 people living within it's boundaries. Chesterton's fire company is a combination station, with fifteen salaried firefighters on three shifts, backed up by sixteen volunteers, manning a pair of engines, a tanker, a tower ladder, a squad. and a brush truck.

While a diamond crossing collision, thankfully isn't even possible in Porter today, the rail lines in Porter are still busy, with dozens of trains rolling through town daily, so a train wreck is absolutely a possibility. And yes, two trains can still collide in Porter, though modern technology has made it far  far less likely than it was a century and change ago. You could even still have a broadside collision, if a train was transitioning from, say, the southbound track to the eastbound track, and a second train missed a signal at the same instant that all of the automatic train control equipment took a powder. Unlikely, but it could happen.

If the unthinkable did happen, and say, a freight train slammed into the side of an Amtrak passenger train at one of the wyes at the former crossing site, Porter County would respond big. Companies 9 and 5...Porter and Chesterton...would definitely be on the initial alarm, and, knowing what they were responding to, the soon-to-be incident commander would be on the radio, calling for additional resources, almost before the rigs cleared the station's apron.

It being a major incident, once the first in company rolled in, a command post would be set up hard by the scene, and various sectors (Rescue, fire suppression, medical, etc) would be set up, with an officer (Captain or above, likely) assigned to command each.

All of the resources that weren't available at the Diamond Crossing Collision would be at our fictional crash today, in copious quantity, while the construction of modern passenger cars would create a problem that didn't exist in 1921...rather than the cars coming apart, and the passengers being ejected, the cars would 'crush' in such a collision, and passengers would be more likely to become trapped in damaged cars.

Hydraulic rescue tools (The Jaws of Life and it's several clones) would be deployed from multiple rescue trucks and truck companies (Ladder trucks), while the engine company crews would stretch lines to knock down any fires, protect trapped passengers, and mitigate hazards while hazmat crews would handle any diesel fuel leaks (Or other chemical  leaks from the freight train).

It being a passenger train, out first in fire officer would have likely called for additional ambulances. and those crews, assisted by fire department personnel, would be treating and stabilizing patients as they were found, and proving the definitive pre-hospital care that didn't exist a hundred years ago. Ambulances would be queued up at a staging area, awaiting patients.

Hospitals would be implementing their disaster plans, personnel would be called in from days off, and the ERs and surgical suites would be fully staffed and at the ready.

OH...and those crowds that were standing around the wreck at the diamond crossing collision? Wouldn't even come close to happening today. The local and State Police would have a perimeter set up at least a quarter mile or so around the scene, and if you weren't either an authorized First Responder (Spell that Fire, EMS, or Law Enforcement personnel, Railroad personnel, or Authorized State or Federal Government personnel such as NTSB ), you wouldn't get anywhere even close to the scene.

 The only sort-of exception would be residents of the immediate area, and if there wasn't a public safety hazard, they would be allowed to stay in their homes, but wouldn't be allowed to approach the scene. If there was a hazard, such as a chemical release or major uncontrolled fire, of course, they would be evacuated.

So emergency response today would be almost...not quite, but almost...180 degrees away from the response to the Diamond Crossing Disaster. While the response to the Diamond Crossing disaster was actually well organized and well executed, they just didn't have the resources that are available today.

As for the guys at Porter County Companies 9 and 5...Porter and Chesterton...the rigs they'd be responding with today are so far removed from what they had 102 years ago that there's no real comparison...the only similarities are that both the 1921 rigs and the modern rigs had petroleum fueled internal combustion engines, and pumped water.. Of course the basic job...putting water on the fire to extinguish it...is the same, but the tools the guys use to do that job are so much more advanced.

Also, the job is not only more advanced, but greatly expanded. Porter and Chesterton's guys would be handling the tasks taken on by the railroad, and the doctors and nurse on the relief train a century ago. Porter County EMS is handled by a third agency, but all of the county's firefighters are trained to at least the EMT level, and all of the county's fire companies run EMS first response rigs, and assist the EMS agency on a regular basis. The fire department would also handle rescue...as in the actual accessing and disentangling victims of the crash...and Hazmat. They've probably drilled on the very scenario I used as an example, likely as a Disaster Drill...And, like firefighters and EMS personnel the world over, they hope those drills are the only time they have to prove how ready they are to handle such an incident. 

<***> Notes, Links, And Stuff<***>

Doing the research is half or more of the fun of writing this blog, but it's even more fun, and far less frustrating, when you don't run up on a bunch of dead ends and dead links.

With that thought in mind, even though the usually all but inevitable Wikipedia page was among the missing, and there weren't but three links leading to info about the wreck, this one ended up being about as simple and straightforward to knock out as you can get. Thanks to an amateur historian who has a serious jones for the history of his home turf, and an awesome railroad history site, the info that was available on two of those sites was good, solid info, but... 

...Most helpful of all was the the third link, to the ICC report, which was available in full from the D.O.T. archive site. Having the ICC report (Or, after April 1st, 1967, the NTSB report) makes a world of difference when researching one of these posts, trust me on this. You get an accurate telling of the facts, figures, and how of the incident you're researching, and occasionally you even get an unusually juicy tidbit of info, though the Porter collision wasn't one of those times (Unless you count the multiple violations committed by the Michigan Central crew in the years before the wreck). Oh...there's a little caveat to using these old reports...you've got to keep your eyes open, especially on the older ICC reports. I found a map of a scene mirror-reversed one time...an error probably committed when the report was archived rather than in the original. But even having to watch for such archiving errors, being able to access an ICC or NTSB report simply and absolutely rocks if you're a history blogger!

This brings us to Caveat Numero Dos...you're not going to be able to find every report you want, and the further back you go, the more likely you'll come up empty. Train wrecks earlier than 1912 and plane crashes earlier than 1932 or so just ain't happening, and finding reports for incidents occurring after those dates can tend to be hit or miss. So far, I've been batting about .450 or so as to whether I could find an ICC/CAB/ NTSB report or not on these older incidents.

Anyway, thanks to those three sites, I had plenty of info, details, pictures, maps and diagrams...and even had some of my work done for me. Generally I always use a satellite image to knock out a diagram of  the scene with graphics illustrating what happened, and, lo and behold, what should I run up on but just that! And this particular diagram was far better than mine unusually turn out. I found it on the same blog where I found the victim's list and a slew of scene photos. Credit, of course, was given to both the creator of the image, and the awesome blog from which it came.

 Only thing I would have liked a bit more of was some more detail on the two locomotives, and some personal history of at least a few of the victims. But, as we all know, ya can't have everything. I didn't have a whole lot of information about the victims of the wreck this time, so I decided to forgo the usual speculation about their lives and their actions during/after the incident that I usually include. I did, however, include a list of the victims, several of which had hyper-links to their Find-A-Grave pages. Hopefully this will help memorialize the victims, and keep their memories alive.

As is true with all of my posts, I did a bit of speculating as to who said and did what, and when they said and did it...As I've noted before, I try to keep my posts from being dry recitations of fact and figures, and I strive to make them interesting and readable. I hope I succeeded here. 

As always, any errors are mine and mine alone, and anyone who has better info, please feel free to comment. All of my posts are eternally works in progress, and I have absolutely no problem with going in to make corrections.

And with that...On to the notes!

<***>

What are the chances that the two railroads involved in the very first major loss of life train wreck...which was a diamond crossing collision...would, nearly seventy years later, also be involved in the very last major loss-of-life diamond crossing collision, only forty or so miles from the site of that first major wreck.

Pretty good, apparently, because, well, it happened! 

OK, so one of the two railroads (The Michigan Southern) had been folded into a much larger railroad (The New York Central) by the time the Porter collision happened, but it's still a pretty amazing coincidence!

<***>

The Porter, Indiana diamond crossing, along with the same tower that controlled it back in 1921, was in active use right on up to the late 70s or early '80s before the crossing was removed, the track layout completely reconfigured, and the tower finally torn down. But just because that crossing was eliminated doesn't mean all of them were by a long shot. There was even one still being controlled by manual semaphore signals...just as the Porter crossing was the night of the wreck...up until 2007. And that crossing wasn't out in the middle of no-where on a desolate wind-swept prairie...far from it. That crossing was...and still is...smack dab in the middle of Chicago.

The crossing's in Chicago's Brighton Park and had the distinction of being one of the last such diamond crossings in the U.S. controlled by manual semaphore signals. The manual signals, controlled by big levers in a wooden watchman's shack, were in operation until 2007, and harked back to the steam era. 

The crossing, with Canadian National (Formally Illinois Central) tracks crossing the Norfolk Southern, is still active, and features ten separate diamond crossings. It's located near South Archer Ave and South Western Ave. The semaphores and the signalman's shack are now long gone...the crossing's now controlled by automatic interlocking and more modern signaling. The semaphores were removed and sent to a museum, and the shack was also supposed to go to a museum, but burned before it could be moved.

The crossing is due to be replaced by a bridge, with the Canadian National crossing the Norfolk Southern/CSX tracks, but so far those plans are in the 'Being Talked About, But Unfunded' stage. 

Illinois Central #6050 pulls a freight across the CSX and Norfolk Southern tracks at Brighton Park Crossing during the Summer of 1996. This was the last manually controlled diamond crossing in the U.S., and remained so until 2007. The manually controlled semaphore signals were operated from the small frame cabin on the left side of the frame. BIG manual levers inside the cabin pushed/pulled rods that ran through pipes to the semaphore masts. From what I read, it took a bit of muscle to operate them.

All trains were required to stop before preceding, and occasionally at night, a train crew would have to make the trek over to the cabin to wake the operator up so he could clear them to precede through the crossing. This all came to an end in July 2007, when new automated signals were installed, and the crossings themselves were rebuilt. Ultimately, the crossing is going to be replaced with a bridge (Canadian National, crossing the CSX/NS tracks) but that project is in the talking but unfunded stage as I type this. 

<***>

 Both the number of fatal diamond crossing crashes that have occurred over the years and the number of diamond crossings still in service today sort of surprised me as I was researching the diamond crossing wrecks I've covered so far.

 I actually ran up on at least four such collisions (Including this one) with either major loss of life (Less than 25) or catastrophic loss of life (25 or more) while I was researching this wreck, as well as two or three with little or no information available about them. Interestingly, none of the four major wrecks are among the better-known rail crashes despite this type of crash being both unique and unusual. Though I haven't found any information other than the location of three more such crashes, I'm assuming, until I discover more info, that loss of life was minimal or, better yet, no deaths occurred at all. 

These major diamond crossing collisions are also pretty much confined to the latter half of the 19th Century, and the first quarter of the 20th Century...The Porter Indiana collision was, in fact, the very last major loss of life diamond crossing wreck. Traffic control, safety technology, and likely more than a little luck have prevented major loss of life at subsequent diamond crossing crashes, though it hasn't completely prevented the crashes themselves.

<***>

 

I was also surprised at the number of Diamond Crossings still in service on major railroads. Not only are there several such crossings where, say, an east-west division of a railroad crosses a north-south division of the same road, there are also quite a few diamond crossings where two major railroads cross. A few of them (Hopefully a very few) don't have any form of positive train control protecting them.

And trust me, collisions at diamond crossings have not been completely eliminated...there was one, for example, in 2015 between two Union Pacific freights at a non-Positive-Train-Control diamond that was caused by crew fatigue...both the engineer and fireman of the striking train were asleep. Thankfully all of the injuries were minor, but that had to be one of the rudest awakenings on record!

<***> Links <***>

My multi-post run of good luck, links-wise, continues. Despite the fact that this incident isn't all that well known outside of Porter County (And truth be known, likely inside of Porter County either), I still managed to run up on three good, solid links, one of which was the ICC report, as well as a short but very interesting video.

For  the third or forth post in a row, I'm including all of the links I found (I mean really...there weren't but four of 'em!)

On to the Links!!

https://planeandtrainwrecks.com/Document?db=DOT-RAILROAD&query=(select%20803)  The full text from the wreck's ICC report...always a an awesome resource to have available, especially if you want a accurate recounting of facts, figures, and just what happened. This site has been updated and upgraded extensively, and probably around 70-80% of the reports generated over the last century and change are available. When the report comes up, it's sharp, very readable text with the option to download the original report as a PDF file. 

Nice as the site is...and it is low-key awesome...it still has an aggravating little glitch. When you click on the provided link, you may get a blank page initially, but there's an easy work-around. Go up to the gray-shaded toolbar along the top of the page. Click 'Previous Document', which will bring up the text of the previous document in the archive. Then click 'Next Document'...and the text of the Porter collision appears.

http://www.porterhistory.org/2016/02/invitation-to-disaster-1921-porter.html A very comprehensive, informative, and readable post about the Porter collision, on Porter County native Steve Shrooks excellent history blog, which is dedicated to the history of Porter County and environs there-of. 

michiganrailroads.com - Disaster at Porter, Indiana - 1921  Very comprehensive and informative article about the wreck from Michigan Railroads.com, which, I might add, is a site that every railfan and railroad history buff should have in his bookmarks. You can get pleasantly lost on this site for hours!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cApoTjFpek&ab_channel=MatthewCipolla   Short, but very interesting little video about the wreck. The video consists of a bit under two minutes of vintage footage shot at the scene of the wreck, all of it impressively high quality.