WRECK OF WOMEN'S TRAIN

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 4, 29 June 1911, Page 3

WRECK OF WOMEN'S TRAIN

SEVEN TEACHERS KILLED. New York, May 0. An exclusion traiu carrying 200 school teacher* from Syracuse and Utica to Washington, while travelling at fifty miles an hour, left the rails near Easton, Pennsylvania, and plunged over a 40ft. embankment The train caught fire, and it is reported that a guard was killed, six women were burned to death, and another killed, and 50 are seriously injured. With the exception of the enginedriver, stoker, and three guards, the train carried no men. As it rolled down the embankment the train ripped open the side of a large oil tank, the contents of which flowed over the wrecked carriages. Nearly half the teachers were imprisoned honeath the overturned carriages, while the rest were strewn beside, the rails.

Almost immediately the carriages hurst into flames from the locomotive's ashes. The engine-driver lay beside the locomotive with both arms broken, one guard was found dead, and the stoker was unconscious.

Under the direction of the twj> remaining guards the uninjured worner! smashed the carriage windows with stones and pieces of wreckage, and pulled their unconscious friends out of the debris before the flames could reach them. With; in an hour the entire train was consumed by flames, but when the muster roll of teachers wais called only six were missing. One otherrwas killed. Fifty women were badly injured and several are maincd for life.

In rolling over the embankment the , train tore up a telegraph pole and snapped the wires, so that it was t hours before any definite news of the disaster reached the railway officials. Meantime every neighboring farm was converted into* a temporary hospital, and the countryside was swept for doctors and nurses, who hurried to the scene in carts 1 and motor-cars.

There is no doubt that the six missing feacker* wrec burned to death in the train. -a .