A Railway Horror

Feilding Star, Volume IX, Issue 42, 27 September 1887, Page 3

A Railway Horror

Oat from Peria, HI., Wednesday evening, August 10, sped a special train with fifteen coaches, crowded with over nine hundred gay, happyhearted excurioirists. Just before midnight, as drawn by two engines, it ~ passed through Chatsworth at rapid .' speed, the engineer saw, to his horror, a burning bridge ahead. Death, and •a dreadful death, was there inexorable. Into the lire and do vn through the bridge the train phmgod in . an «iwful wreck. Ower 100 people 'were ?-illed outright, and four times that , number injured. Seventy- three bodies, wangled beyond almost recognition, have been taken from the wreck. ■jT^he work of rescue was a hard and brave on« by the survivors. H. W. White, one of the survivors, «ayg : — One of the horrible incidents Was* man well dressed who was so ■ badly injured that his bowela were protruding, fie called passionately for water, and as he could not be attended, to, he finally pulled out his revolver and shot himself through the head. One little boy, the son of a Methodist minister at Abington, Frank Snadecker, was found on the bosom of his dead mother. His left leg hung by the skin, his right arm was broken, and one eye was put out. He never uttered a groan as they pulled him put, and tried to give him a drink of brandy. He refused t* take it, and* jßaid, "Give me water."- I found a head hanging from the trusk. It was apparently a man, and had been caught by Hie hair. I found several headless bodies. Those who recognised the dead immediately ticketed them. There was one incident of the accident which stood out more horrible than all of those horrible scenes. In the second coach was a man, his wife and little child. When the accident oc- ' eurred the entire family of three was caught, and held down by broken woodwork. Finally, when relief came, the man turned to his friend, and feebly said—" Take out my wife first. I'm afraid the child is dead." So they carried out the mother, and as a broken seat was taken off her crushed

breast, the blood which welled from

her Jips told how badly she was hurt. < They carried the child, a fair-haired,

blue-eyed girl of nine, and laid her in • the cornfield, dead, alongside of her dying mother. Then they went back for the father, and brought him out. Both his legs were broken, but he ' crawled through, the grass to the side : of his wife, and feeling the loved features in the darkness pressed some . brandy to her lips, and. asked her how ; she felt. A feeble groan was the only Answer, and the next instant she died. ■ The man turned away from his dead wife and child, and cried, "My God, there is nothing more for me to live ior now," and taking a pistol from his pocket, pulled the trigger. The bullet went surely through his brain, and the three dead bodies of that little family lay side by side in the waving porn- •