A FRIGHTFUL RAILWAY ACCIDENT.

Temuka Leader, Issue 378, 23 April 1881, Page 3

A FRIGHTFUL RAILWAY ACCIDENT.

The details of a frightful railway accident on the Erie railway, by which five men were burned to death, recall the ghastly memories of the Abergale disaster. The night mail train from Buffalo to Jersey went off the line from some unexplained cause, near Owego, when travelling at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour. The six cars rolled over and over down an embankment. In the postal car were four men sorting letters by the light of twelve kerosene lamps. The lamps broke. In a moment. the car was in a blaze. Rescue was impossible, and the awestruck passengers stood helplessly looking on the fiae in which four fellow creatures were being burned to death. An express car caught fire, and efforts were made to extricate its solitary occupant. A hole was cut in the door, and the man’s head appeared in the opening, but he could not force himself out. The hole created a draught upon which the fire seized, and it suddenly shot up the legs and body of the man, surrounded his head in one great sheet of flame, and he sank back and was literally roasted to death before the eyes of the horror stricken spectators When his body was finally rescued from the wreck it had lost all semblance of human form/’