The Ghostly Children of San Antonio, Texas

The Ghostly Children of San Antonio, Texas

The Most Famous Bus Crash That Never Happened

After eighteen or so months of researching and writing and proofreading, and rewriting schoolbus-train crash posts I've decided that it's finally almost time to put them to rest...but I can't quite do so just yet because, ya see, there's one more bus-train crash story to tell.  And this won't be just any post about just any accident, either. See, this one has it's very own ghost. Ten of 'em, in fact. And these aren't just any ol' ghosts either. This ghostly crew's story has become what's arguably the most famous ghost story in Texas.

 

We're heading for the south-central part of The Lone Star State for this one, and our destination's a quaint little burg that's home to around 1.4 million people, some of the best Mexican food anywhere north of the border, and a building all of you may have heard of known as 'The Alamo'.  I'm talking, of course, about the lovely and historic city of San Antonio, Texas.

We're going to ignore San Antonio's better known historic sites, as well as...very reluctantly...it's multitude of awesome Mexican restaurants as we bypass the city's more populated areas and head for a 90 degree curve on a back road in the more sparsely settled far south-eastern corner of the city. The curve in question is the one where Villamain Road, which runs parallel to a still active spur of the Union Pacific Railroad for a half mile or so, heaves itself around 90 degrees to the left to become Shane Road, crossing the U.P.tracks while it's at it...the very crossing where what would become Texas' most famous ghost story took root.

If you've read the rest of my Bus-Train crash posts, the gist of the story's a familiar one. A school bus with ten Catholic elementary school kids aboard was on Shane Road sometime after sun-down, heading towards Villamain Road enroute home from a field trip, when the bus engine decided to die at the very instant that they rolled onto the crossing. According to the story, all of the kids, exhausted from their day-long field trip, were asleep. The nun who was driving the bus, figuring that the engine would fire right back up, decided to let the kids sleep as she tried to start the bus. I mean, it'd probably start right back up, right?

Of course, as the story goes, it didn't. She'd cranked it a couple of times without success when the headlight of an approaching train suddenly appeared from around a curve. She tried desperately to crank the bus one more time as the engineer of the train spotted the bus sitting across the tracks and went sweaty-pale and wide-eyed as he yanked his brakes into emergency and laid down on the whistle, sending it's mournful wail across the countryside as steel wheels screed against steel rails.

The locomotive slammed into the bus broadside, ripping it in two and sending the front half of the bus spinning off of the tracks while dragging the rear half for a couple of hundred yards before tossing it aside, on the opposite side of the tracks, as the train slid to a stop. All ten of the children who were aboard the bus are supposed to have lost their lives in the accident.

The driver was uninjured, but devastated by the deaths, holding herself entirely responsible. As time passed she became more and more despondent until she finally decided to take her own life. And she wasn't going to do so using just any method...she decided to drive her personal car to the very crossing where the accident occurred, and park across the tracks, waiting for a train to happen by and end it all...

...So, on a dark, moonless night several months after the accident she tried to do just that. She parked near the crossing, waited until she heard a train coming, then pulled forward, across the tracks, and composed herself, awaiting her fate...and that's when things got more than a little strange.

She felt her car start rocking, then heard little kid voices encouraging each other, and then the car started to move, rolling uphill towards Villamain Road. The nun looked behind her, out of the car's rear window, but saw nothing but the empty, dark roadway behind her. The headlight of the train hove into view...just as it had on the night of the bus crash....and the engineer laid down on the whistle as the car slowly bumped across the rails, then rolled clear of the crossing, coming to a stop a few feet away from the tracks as the train thundered past. The nun sat there in shock for several minutes...long enough for the train to clear the crossing...then got out and looked around, likely more than half expecting to see the children who she'd heard talking standing around on the side of the road, but she saw no one. She walked around behind the car, still looking for the kids, but, of course, they weren't there. 

She did find something, though. The rear most part of the trunk lid, as well as the back bumper, was covered with hand prints...small, child sized hand prints. She counted, and came up with twenty hands...meaning ten children. The same number who'd been aboard her ill-fated bus. Obviously ten little angels had been dispatched to save her. She immediately decided that she had been saved for a reason, and told this story widely in the weeks afterwards.

True believers in The Ghostly Children will tell you...enthusiastically...that several of the people she told of this amazing occurrence rode out to the crossing to check it out for themselves and also noted the exact same phenomenon.  If they stopped on or just short of the tracks, they'd first feel their car rock gently and start moving, then hear the voices of the children, then, once they were clear of the crossing, see the hand prints on the trunk. More then one person noted that Shane Road actually...and we're gonna say apparently...climbed a very gentle hill as it approached the tracks. Just a very very subtle upgrade, but, we have to assume, enough of one to keep a car from rolling across the tracks on its own. (Keep this point in mind!)

And thus, a ghost story was born! And lets be honest here...there are very few better settings for a railroad-crossing-based ghost story than Shane and Villamain Rds. The area immediately surrounding the crossing is about as desolate as you can get and still be within the boundaries of a major city. OK, never mind the fact that, today, I-410 is under a quarter mile north of the crossing and a drive of a half mile or so in any direction will land you smack dab in the middle of modern suburban life...the crossing itself is surrounded by woods. It looks pretty desolate at noon on a bright, sunny day, so at, say, midnight on, say, Halloween night, it'd be a ghost-hunters dream come true.

A few tens of thousands of people have apparently agreed with that assessment over the last few decades. Over the several decades, the story...however it may have come to be... spread  first throughout the state, then throughout the country, until taking a trip to San Antonio to check out The Story of the Ghostly Children very much became a 'Thing'. The coming of The Internet only threw even more fuel on the ghost-child flames, spreading the story nationally and internationally to the point that at certain times of the year...I'm looking at you, Halloween...there were very literal traffic jams on narrow Shane Road as hundreds of travelers...from car loads of high school and college kids, to families, to professional ghost hunters...showed up to check out the Ghostly Children.

Whether they showed up singly or in groups, they all used the same basic procedure to check for the presence or absence of Ghost Children, almost as if it had been written down in an S.O.P. manual. First, they'd look up Shane Road towards the crossing, and note that the road did indeed appear to run subtly uphill towards the tracks. Then, if they were really prepared, they'd liberally sprinkle baby powder or talcum powder over the trunk and bumper...the better to reveal any ghostly hand prints that our tiny poltergeist might leave behind. Then they'd climb back in their ride, drive to the crossing (Again, depending on the time of year and possibly the weather, often having to wait in line), park either on or just short of the crossing, pop the transmission into neutral, and wait. And, sure 'nuff, the car would ultimately start moving, rolling towards the curve where Shane Road became Villamain Road, tires bumping subtly as they hit the rail-heads, until the car was safely clear of the tracks.

Then everyone would get back out of the vehicle, walk around to the rear, and gaze at the trunk and back bumper as if they were paying solemn respect to some unnamed idol. More often than not, eyes and mouths would both go wide in wonder and astonishment as they spotted hand prints and finger prints on the metal.

Hand prints supposedly left by 'The Ghostly Children'. I don't count but seven sets of hand prints...three of the Ghost-Kids must've been supervising on this one. 

Now, I don't know if anyone counted hand-prints and came up with the twenty hands that would mean all ten ghost-kids were pushing, or if they just 'oohed and aahed' at the very existence of said hand prints, but the hand prints were, in most cases, indeed there.

So many amateur ghost-hunters and curiosity-seekers have been inspired to check out The Ghostly Children that San Antonio P.D would occasionally have to get involved, due to both traffic issues and other less-than-legal activities. I have a feeling that more than a few cans of beer have been emptied on the road side and more than just a few underage drinking tickets have been given out.

...And yet, even with long, long lines, shady individuals of the non-ghostly variety lurking about, and the risk of tickets and the loss of  their favorite Refreshing Golden Beverages, the people still came, in huge numbers...singly and in groups. TV shows were filmed, parties were had, and pictures and videos were taken...and that, my friends, is how The Legend of The Ghost Children of San Antonio became the most famous ghost Story in Tex...

<***>

Stop Right There!!! 

...Come on gang...you really didn't think this was the end of the story did ya. What about the accident that created the legend?? Where, you may ask, is the in-depth analysis? The speculation? The discussion on emergency response?? Something a few of you may be thinking, is fishy here. And to that I reply...you're absolutely right!

You see, while thousands upon thousands of ghost seekers have, and still do, journey to Shane and Villamain annually to check out The Ghostly Children, the story they're chasing just doesn't hold up. 

Try something. Go to Google, and plug 'San Antonio Bus-Train crash' in. Search away. And yes, a slew of results pop up...all of them stories of the Ghost Children. None of them, however...as in Not. A. Single. One...reference any specific accident in the state of Texas, much less one in San Antonio or at that particular San Antonio grade crossing. 

You guys, BTW, aren't even close to being the first people who've discovered this little anomaly while searching for this apparently very elusive train crash. And Google isn't even vaguely the only place info about said accident is missing from.

First lets talk about the long time residents of San Antonio. The accident at Shane and Villamain supposedly happened in the late Thirties, so even people who were first or second graders at the time would be in their early to mid eighties if they're till around. There probably aren't many of them left, and fewer of them are around with each passing year. So, while finding a San Antonio born octogenarian who could confirm or deny that the accident happened, first hand, isn't an absolute impossibility, it's becoming more difficult by the day. As with any city, however, there are younger lifelong and long-time San Antonio residents who've made recording the history of their town a beloved and dedicated hobby, so we can just ask one of them about the accident..

With that fact in mind, go to San Antonio and ask some of the city fathers who to ask about their city's history...you know, not just the stuff that's in history books, but the little fascinating details of local history that you really have to dig for. Trust me, they'll know exactly who to refer you to.

Next, go find a one of these amateur historians and ask them about the tragic bus-train crash at Shane and Villamain.  They will then, while very likely giving you one of those looks that just freaking screams 'Oh, God, not another one' , very quickly tell you that they've never heard of a bus-train accident...an actual bus-train accident as opposed to the mythical variety...at that crossing because no such accident ever happened there, or anywhere else in San Antonio or even Texas, in the first place.

Then our historian will go on to point out one very strong bit of speculation and several very relevant facts that absolutely prove that the accident never happened.

First the speculation...if there had been ten kids killed in a bus crash in San Antonio, there would be some memory of it. These kids were supposedly on the way back into town, which means they lived in San Antonio, which means they would have had relatives their own age or younger who would have grown up and passed the story about Aunt Mary or Uncle Jimmy or Cousin Bob being killed in that horrible bus accident in San Antonio down to their own kids. 

Guess what gang. Nada. No one living who now lives or has ever lived in San Antonio can recall any stories passed down by relatives or friends about siblings or kinfolk dying in a train-school bus crash in San Antonio. Anywhere in or even near San Antonio, much less at that particular crossing.

'But wait!!!' the diehard Ghost-Child fans among us will point out.  'There's a subdivision just to the north east of the crossing...almost with-in rock-throwing distance...and the streets all have child-like names. These streets are supposedly named after the children killed in the accident. So just plug the location of this elusive accident along with a couple of the first names used for the street names into Google, Bing, or your search engine of choice,  and see what...'

...And several people were way ahead of you on this one. The streets are named after the grand kids of the guy who developed the subdivision. All of whom have grown up happy and healthy.

So much for speculation...now we get into the indisputable facts. 

Even in the very unlikely possibility that everyone with any reason to remember such an accident has passed away, there would still be official documentation. Even eighty years ago, a major accident that resulted in the death of ten kids would have generated literal reams of reports and paperwork, especially if it occurred in a large city. There would be investigative reports from the local and State police as well as State and Federal regulatory commissions, transcripts of court proceedings, and records of the burials of the victims...who would have been also named in the aforementioned local and State reports. 

Also, even in the1930s, San Antonio's population was pushing a quarter million, so they had a pretty large and (For the day) well equipped fire department. It's just about a given that S.A.F.D. would have  responded to a major bus-train crash, even if only peripherally, and that would have also generated a report. Make that reports...one for each company that responded.

Guess what? None of these agencies, be they local, State, or Federal, have any record at all of a bus-train accident with 10 fatalities anywhere in San Antonio or even the State of Texas during that period, much less one at that particular crossing. 

While we're at it, a search of the archives of the fire and police departments of Texas' larger cities would yield the exact same result. No school bus-train crashes with even one fatality, much less ten. And trust me...a ten fatality accident would have left an official footprint somewhere. A whole slew of 'em in fact.

Now, lets talk a bit about The Media. A freight train hitting a school bus and killing ten kids would, to put it mildly, set off a media feeding frenzy. True, back in the Thirties the technology to send it around the world instantly didn't exist as it does today, but, with the accident happening late at night, the local papers and radio stations would have had it by the next morning, the wire services by lunchtime, (If not a bit sooner,) and by the next evening...morning of the second day at the very  latest...it would be a front page newspaper story and lead radio newscast story from coast to coast and border to border. This is, in fact, what happened with all of the accidents from the '30s and '40s that I've posted about.

If newspapers nationwide covered the story, that would mean it would show up in searchable on-line newspaper archives, which takes us back to the old Google-machine and it's kin. Again, if you plug in 'San Antonio Train-Bus Crash', or any version there-of into any newspaper's search box, the only archived stories you get are those about the Ghost-Children. Nothing about an actual accident, much less one that killed ten kids. 

I've researched nine bus train crashes from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, all of which resulted in ten or more fatalities, and while the quantity and quality of information available varied widely from incident to incident, there was always something  out there...even for the Proberta, California accident, which is just five years shy of being a century ago.  Google searches for All of them yielded at least one or two archived news-paper articles, even, again, the nearly century old Proberta crash. 

That being the case, it stands to reason that, had there been such an accident in San Antonio, there'd be something out there. Problem for the story is...it's not. 

The accident never happened, gang. It just, well, didn't.

This little factual bump-in-the-road very obviously hasn't discouraged the thousands of people who show up annually to check out The Ghostly Children for themselves. So with that thought in mind, lets look at the practical side of the story...is someone or something actually pushing all of theses cars up-hill and off of the tracks?  

 Lets take a look at a couple of street view pics of the crossing first...
 

This is what a driver on Shane Rd sees as he's approaching the crossing. Told ya it was a desolate looking area! Hard to believe this is with-in the city limits of a city of over a million people. Also...and the actual point of this image...you don't even have to look all that hard to see that, yes, it in fact does look like you're heading uphill as you approach the tracks. The question is...are you? Read on.

Same view. but a little closer. The crossing is still an unprotected crossing, BTW. That's just a standard cross-buck, what lpoks like it may be warning lights beneath the cross buck is just a 'Yield' sign.

Hmmmm... Shane Road does indeed seem to be, at the very least, level if not climbing a very slight grade as it approaches the crossing.

 The question is...is it?

This question was answered for us in expert and entertaining fashion by The SciFi Network's 'The Miracle Hunter'  a few years back.  'The Miracle Hunter' host Johnathan Levit, along with his crew and several truckloads of equipment, headed for San Antonio to film an episode that would either confirm or debunk 'The Myth Of The Ghostly Children'. The area immediately surrounding the crossing was wall to wall packed with cars and people the day the episode was filmed, which I'm pretty sure is exactly what they wanted to happen. Given the fact that the episode and filming for same were probably widely publicized in the San Antonio Metro Area for several weeks beforehand, if there hadn't been a huge crowd it would have not only been a surprise, it would have also been a near-killing-blow for the episode...

Take a look-see at the segment of The Miracle Hunters dealing with The Ghostly Children, posted below...

You guys KNEW I'd post this!  The full Miracle Hunters segment on The Ghostly Children

The crew first shot several establishing frames looking up Shane Road while Jonathan commented sagely on the fact that Shane Road does look like it runs uphill towards the crossing. They then panned the camera across the crowd, showing people sprinkling talcum or baby powder across the cars' trunks to preserve any ghostly hand prints that might appear to prove that their cars, if they did indeed roll across the tracks, were pushed across by tiny poltergeist.

And then of course, they filmed several cars rolling slowly across the tracks...that was, after all, the whole point of the episode. After the cars were spirited across the tracks, they interviewed the occupants, taking particular care in showing them pointing to the allegedly new hand prints that had appeared on the trunk lids and rear bumpers of their rides. They asked these same people if they had washed their cars before they came. None of them had, BTW.  Keep this fact in mind...it'll be important here in a minute or so. 

So, to review, the cars were indeed rolling across the tracks with no help from their engines. And hand prints were indeed appearing on the trunk lids. So something was going on...but what? That, of course, is what Jonathon Levit and his crew were there to find out. Spoiler Alert...if you're a fan of The Ghost Children, you're probably not going to like the answer they came up with.

The show team car was readied, and in the process of being readied, it was washed. We're talking 'Had it professionally washed at a high-end car wash' kinda washed. They even set up cameras, both inside and outside the ride, to show the Official Washing in progress. 

Then, once they arrived at Shane and Villamain, Johnathon wiped down the back of the car good to ensure it was indeed squeaky clean, produced a can of talcum powder, and, with great dramatic flourish and camera rolling, sprinkled it liberally across the Jeep Cherokee's lift-gate.

 He then got behind the wheel, positioned the car several dozen yards from the crossing,  popped the transmission into neutral, and waited. They only had to wait for a couple of seconds or so before the car, unbidden, started rolling. And, as had happened to literally thousands of cars since the Legend Of The Ghost Children was born, it bumped across the tracks and rolled on, stopping a few feet beyond, safely clear of the crossing. And yes, in fact, it did look like it was rolling up hill.

The question is, of course, was it? To answer that question the producers of The Miracle Hunter  enlisted the services of a couple of veteran surveyors who were armed with GPS equipped digital surveying equipment that very likely cost a couple of times as much as the vehicle it rode there on.

They set up the equipment with the the first rail that a car on Shane Road would cross as the zero-elevation baseline, sighted on it from 20 feet out, took a reading, and found that the road's elevation had increased..not by much, only about 3/4 of an inch in fact, but it had still increased. Meaning that Shane Road was running uphill as you went away from the crossing...and therefore (Lets all say it together)  down hill as you approached the crossing. But that was just a barely perceptible grade at 20 feet out. The road could have just pitched down, barely, as it got closer to the tracks.

So they took several more readings at points ever further from the crossing and found that the results were consistent...Shane Road ran down-grade as it approached the crossing. Barely down grade, to the tune of a sub 1% grade (A 1% grade is an elevation change of 1 foot in a horizontal run of 100 feet) but still enough of a downgrade for a car with it's transmission in neutral to start rolling. Down hill. Across the crossing. Without any assistance, ghostly or otherwise.

So...it seems that the mystery of the Ghost Children has been solved...busted in fa...

"BUT WAIT!!!!" I hear everyone...OK, the Ghost-Child-Believers among you...yell.  What about the hand prints?

Ahhh...the hand prints! First, there were no hand prints...ghostly or otherwise...on Jonathan's ride after it rolled across the tracks. And, cool as a rescue performed by a bunch of tiny ghosts would be, that one's even easier to explain...and debunk...than the allegedly uphill-rolling cars.  

Think back on all of the cop shows you've ever seen...what's one of the very first things that the fictional detectives/crime scene techs/what have you do when they arrive at the fictional crime scene. 

If you don't say 'Dust For Fingerprints' you have never ever actually watched a cop show. But yes...the correct answer is to dust every possible surface that the unknown evil-doer may have touched to see if he left any fingerprints. And one of the oft-exclaimed frustrations voiced by our TV-Crime-Scene- Techs is 'It's been wiped clean!'  

Keep all of the above in mind...it's all relevant.

Jonathon Levit didn't go into the finger prints/no finger prints deal in as much detail as he did the grade leading to the crossing, but the explanation is simplicity itself. See, fingerprints...and hand prints as well...will last for literally years. There was actually a kidnapping case in my home state of Virginia where the victim's hand print was found on the inside of the trunk lid of the prime suspect's car years after the crime was committed, so again, fingerprints and hand prints will last for years...as long as the surface they're left on isn't wiped down.

When you touch an object that'll hold fingerprints...say the back of a car...your fingers leave minute traces of oil behind. Not only that, when the friction ridges that form your fingerprints compress to grip what ever was touched they leave that oil behind in the exact pattern formed by the ridges, which is why fingerprints are so useful for Identification purposes.  This is also why our detectives dust all surfaces with fingerprint powder, as well as why our ghost hunters liberally dust the trunks and bumpers of their cars with talcum powder or baby powder. The powder sticks to the oil, making the pattern formed by the friction ridges stand out more sharply, thus making the finger prints more visible.

And this takes us right back to the 'Ghost Children' episode of The Miracle Hunter, the cars that were filmed rolling across the crossing and the hand prints seen there-upon. Remember Jonathan running his ride through a car wash before he went out to the crossing? Then wiping it down after he got there? The reason he did so had absolutely nothing to do with wanting his ride to really sparkle for the TV  camera's and everything  to do with fingerprints. In fact he was doing the exact same thing that our TV detectives curse their TV suspects for doing. He was wiping it down to remove any old fingerprints that may have been left behind on the lift gate all the times it was opened it in the past. So, when Jonathan, his camera crew, and a few million TV-viewers checked out the back of his ride after it rolled across the tracks, they saw only sunlight gleaming from pristine, unmarked paint. 

 SO that's not only why Jonathan did such a thorough job cleaning his ride, it's also why all the other cars had finger and hand prints there-upon. The other cars hadn't been washed before arriving at the crossing, and the fingerprints on the trunk lids weren't those of tiny but civic minded poltergeist. They were the prints belonging to the owners of the cars, left there every time they opened, then closed, the trunk. 

Sorry, Ghost-Child-Fans, but the story's pretty much just an Urban Legend.

So! Now that Texas' most famous ghost story has (Again) been thoroughly debunked (Hey, I didn't do it! I'm just relaying the facts!) just where the heck did this story come from. Were the residents of San Antonio so bored in 1938 or '39 that they came up with this story out of whole cloth? Sort of maybe. But they had help, and some inspiration...and yes I noted a specific year for a reason. See, there was a bus crash that year, and, in fact, I've posted about it.

The accident that inspired The Ghostly Children occurred on December 1st, 1938 in Sandy Utah, when the driver of a bus load of high school kids crossed in front of an oncoming train and was hit broadside, killing 26. This was also the worst grade crossing accident in U.S. history...a record that still stands and, hopefully, will never be bested...and I posted an article on it HERE.

That crash became a national news story, and with-in 24 hours banner-sized headlines had appeared on just about every front page in the country, so everyone in the U.S. knew about it, and was talking about it by lunchtime on December 2nd...the day after it happened. This included, of course, the residents of San Antonio. Like the rest of the country, San Antonio was subjected to ten solid days of intense coverage of the accident. And somewhere along the way, as the residents of The Mission City read article after article about the horror in Utah, one or more of them became inspired. 

 We'll never know just how or when the illusion of rolling uphill at San Antonio's Shane Road crossing was discovered or who discovered it, but that optical illusion had to have been an already known fact for the ghost story to have been created around it. And we'll certainly never know just exactly how the ghost story came to be created and then associated with that particular crossing. But we can be pretty sure that it was probably a multiple part...and multiple person...occurrence. And we can also be equally sure that it took a good bit of time...maybe even a few years...for the story to be developed.

 I have a feeling that, while discussing the Sandy accident, someone said something like  'Hey, you know that crossing on Shane Road...the one where you have to really keep your foot on the brake when a train's passing, even though it looks like you're going up hill...what if (As their face took on a pondering expression) what if that accident in Sandy had happened here in San Antonio, at that crossing...and those kids' ghosts haunted the crossing...to keep anyone else form getting hit...by pushing cars off of the crossing. I mean cars already roll there...what if it was kids' ghosts pushing them...

OK, as noted above, it almost definitely didn't happen all in one fell swoop in that manner, but over an unknown period of time...probably a couple of years, a least...the accident was moved to Shane and Villamain and the facts were modified to fit the story, in which the bus became our Catholic school bus, the kids became second and third graders, and the number of students was pared down to ten. And those ten fictional kids became our Ghost-Children.

The story was added to and enhanced, and polished  and spread around, and ultimately someone who wasn't in on creating the story, but who had heard it drove to the isolated crossing, sprinkled talcum powder on the trunk of their car, sat in it, popped the tranny into neutral, and was amazed as the car rolled 'uphill', then became even more amazed when they saw the hand and finger prints on the trunk of their car. So they told a some friends who also who tried it and told more friends...and a legendary Texas ghost story was born.

Then Jonathon Levit went and screwed it up for everyone, right? 

Actually, no. The stream of Ghost hunters and Ghost-Child fans didn't slack off in the least. Hordes of Ghost-Child-Seekers still made road trips to the Shane and Villamain to roll across the tracks...

Sadly...because, really, who doesn't love a good Urban Legend, especially one with a good ghost story connected to it...what Jonathon Levit couldn't do, The Union Pacific Railroad almost did manage to do, far more effectively I might add. The railroad had (And very possibly still has) plans to add a passing siding to that section of the tracks, upgrading the crossing while they were at it, with the distinct possibility that the slight grade that allows cars to roll across the crossing would be leveled off just shy of the tracks. This, of course, would mean that, instead of rolling across the tracks, cars will stop just prior to, or on top of, the crossing. Which would kind of defeat the purpose of the urban legend's story, effectively killing it.

It was almost a done deal. The crossing, and thus Shane Road, had been closed so the track construction and crossing upgrades could take place and the Ghost Children had taken a long over-due vacation. The residents of San Antonio...and likely the rest of Texas...were mourning the loss of their favorite ghostly urban legend when Texas' Favorite Ghost Story got at least a temporary reprieve. 

Those crossing upgrade and passing siding plans have been shelved, the crossing has been reopened, and the Ghost Children are back on the job.

It was probably a budget thing...projects get shelved or post-poned or pushed back all the time due to funding issues. Funds earmarked for a project get diverted to a more important project, or something comes up that requires an emergency reallocation of funds. 

And there are no ghostly children...was no fatal bus-train crash in San Antonio...the accident never ever happened, therefore there were no fatalities, therefore the ghost-children just don't exist. This has been pretty well established.

But..it'd still pretty much redefine cool if the real reason the crossing upgrade project was delayed was because Union Pacific's C.E.O., after opening his office on some recent morning,  found ten little ghosts hanging around, doing ghost-type-things. And, upon seeing him enter, the ten little ghosts became serious...or as serious as ghost-children can ever become...and one of the them, elected spokes-ghost by his or her comrades-in-haunting, said to him 'Dude...we gotta talk about this crossing issue... ; ) 

The Ghost Children are not amused by your planned crossing improvements...not amused at all

***********************NOTES, LINKS, AND STUFF*************************

The other posts in this series

in the order they were posted.

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

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

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

March 1972

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

October 1971

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

August 1976

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<***>

I gotta admit, this one made me wish I lived about 1400 miles or so closer to San Antonio. Or that I had the free time and free cash to snag a plane ticket and make the four hour and change flight to The Mission City so I could check out the crossing myself. I mean, really, who doesn't love a good ghost story.

I had this one in mind to wind up the train/bus crash posts almost two years ago, when I started working on this series. It's a fun and unique little story, mythical (And debunked) urban legend though it may be. It's still nice to end this series of posts up with a story that doesn't rip your heart out.

Another interesting point about The Ghostly Children...they are far better documented than any of the actual bus/train crashes I researched. There are literally hundreds of articles on-line about them.

OK...On to the Notes an' such!

<***>

Another interesting point about The Lone Star State's favorite tiny ghosts...no one's really sure just when they came into being. While I had the story being created shortly after the Sandy accident occurred, the legend probably didn't gather steam until the mid or late Forties, and it wasn't well known outside of Texas, apparently, until the Fifties at the earliest.

It had started gathering a good bit of renown by the Seventies, but it really took off with-in the last twenty or so years, with the coming of The Internet.

<***>

Interestingly enough, The Ghostly Children apparently don't limit their activities to San Antonio...a couple of other crossing accidents have inspired their own version of the same story. As all of them popped up at about the same time, so they were all very likely inspired by the Sandy, Utah crash. On top of that, so called 'Gravity Hills'...hills that seem to ascend rather than descend because of the lack of a true horizon creating an optical illusion...are not that uncommon at all, and all of these urban legends are based on such a hill.

Interestingly enough, it would have been impossible for a similar urban legend to actually take root at the now long-gone crossing where the Sandy, Utah crash occurred because that road not only climbed a pretty good grade as it crossed the tracks, it also rounded a pretty sharp curve immediately before the crossing rather than being a straight shot like Shane Road, meaning that there would be no way that a car could roll across the crossing without being driven across..

Of course, train wrecks in general have a habit of inspiring ghost stories, and The Ghostly Children aren't even the only youthful poltergeists directly inspired by the Sandy Utah bus /train crash. That tragic and horrendous crash has it's own ghosts. The kids who never made it to school allegedly haunted the halls and classrooms of old Jordan High School, and then, after a new Jordan High was built, occasionally popped up at the entertainment complex that was built on the site of the old school.

Like The Ghostly Children, these ghosts apparently were (And are) benevolent. Sadly, though, unlike the San Antonio crossing ghost children, the Sandy ghost stories were inspired by an accident that was, tragically, very real.

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San Antonio's Ghostly Children even inspired a movie. The 2006 horror film 'Fingerprints', written and produced by Jason and Brian Cleveland, and directed by Harry Basil, was based all but directly on the Ghostly Children. 

Poster for 'Fingerprints'

In the film, a teenage girl (Melanie, portrayed by Leah Pipes) gets out of rehab and returns to her small Texas town, where Ghost Children push cars off of a crossing before it can be hit by a train (Hmmmm...that do sound familiar, don't it?). This being a horror film, there's a sinister and evil mystery to go along with the bus crash, and the ghosts, apparently, aren't as benevolent as their San Antonio kindred spirits.

The film never got a wide release...it was an Indie film, released at various film festivals around the country, but it did grab a pretty prestigious award, snagging 'Best Feature Film' at the New York City Horror Film Festival.

For more details about 'Fingerprints', take a look at it's Wikipedia Page and IMDb page 

Both are loaded with good information about the film, and IMDb is the definitive 'Go To' site for info on anything involving either television or film.

<***>

While The Miracle Hunter's investigation of The Ghostly Children is, arguably, the best known debunking of the myth, they're not the only ones who took the Ghost Children to the small screen. The Sci-Fi Channels 'Fact or Faked also did an episode...or half of an episode...devoted to the Ghost Children, and the debunking of same. 

They covered the same material as  'The Miracle Hunter', and took it just a scosh further by interviewing one of those local historians I was talking about above, who explained the ghostly screams that some people reported.

Here's a small segment of the episode:

The full episode is available on Amazon...at a buck ninety-nine a pop. Sure, that's not going to break anyone...but it also prevents me from posting the entire episode.

As for The Ghost Children's opinion of their fleeting small screen fame...through their agent, they declined interview, other than noting that 'Those posers Slimer and Casper get all the good publicity!!!' ;)

<***>

While straight ghost stories and paranormal activity are way beyond the scope of this blog, I'd still be remiss if I didn't mention the fact that The Ghost Children are in good company...San Antonio is known as The Most Haunted City in Texas.

Many if not most of the city's numerous old hotels, such as the The Menger, The Crockett, The Sheraton (Formally the Gunter), The Emily Morgan, and The Black Swan Inn, have their own well known ghosts-in-residence.

Then of course you have an obscure little mission known as The Alamo that's home to a few ghosts of it's own. And this is just a small sampling of San Antonio's citizen-ghosts. If you're into the Paranormal...or just curious...just plug San Antonio and 'Most Haunted City' into Google and see what you come up with!

<***>LINKS<***>

As I noted above, there at least seemed to be more articles written about The Ghostly Children then there were of every other bus crash I've posted about combined. Literal pages. And pages. And pages of 'em.

I'm not even going to try to post all of 'em, so what I am gonna do is post the best several links.

http://www.legendsofamerica.com/tx-ghostlychildren.html   Legends of America article about the Ghostly Children. The author is..rightfully...pretty skeptical about the legend. There are also some pretty interesting comments at the end of the article, written by a couple of true believers in the Ghost Children

http://paranormal.about.com/od/hauntedplaces/a/The-Haunted-Railroad-Crossing.htm   Another interesting article, this one written by paranormal phenomenon expert Stephen Wagner. While it disputes an actual bus crash happening at the crossing, it also gives some pretty chilling examples of paranormal activity occurring at Shane and Villamain...pretty convincing stuff if you believe in that sort of thing. It's an interesting and entertaining read whether you 'Believe in Ghosts' or not.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/1298    Roadside America.Com's page about The Ghostly Children. Has some interesting and in depth comments both pro and con, RE: The Ghost Children.. This is an awesome site in general, in fact, chock full of interesting articles about unusual things that can be found along the highways and byways of The U.S. and Canada.

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/ghosts/handprint.asp   Ya just gotta have a Snopes.com page about The Ghostly Children. Spoiler Alert...Snopes pretty much debunks the myth as well. Just not as eloquently as I did ;) :D

http://www.weirdus.com/states/texas/road_less_traveled/children_of_the_tracks/index.php
Weird US.Com also has a page about The Ghostly Children...a collection of stories by people who have indeed checked out the myth.

http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1829-san-antonios-haunted-railroad-tracks-.html
Another blog-post that debunks the myth...and makes a very good point while it's at it.. Be sure to read all the way to the end.

http://sanantonioghosttracks.blogspot.com/   The Ghost Children even have their own blog!!

 

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

Shreve Ohio School Bus/Train Crash-January 3 1930

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

A Double Dose of Tragedy in Ohio.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The kids who lost their lives in the accident:

Wilbur Grube

Forest Grube

Wayne Lehman

Emil Timic

Eugene Talley

Willard Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The children who lost their lives that morning:

Vernon Davidson
 William Davidson

Jacob Walters
 Juanita Walters

Evelyn Kaltenbach 
William Pastorek

Dorothy Zielinski
 Rita Zielinski
 Vincent Zielinski

I believe that the two Davidson boys were the brothers

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

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

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

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

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

The other posts in this series

in the order they were posted.

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

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

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

March 1972

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

October 1971

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

August 1976

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<***>

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, on the the notes!

Shreve, Ohio Notes

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

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

Berea, Ohio Notes

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

<***>

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

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

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

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

 

<***>

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

<***>

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

<***>

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

<***>

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

<***>

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

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

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