DISASTER: Death Rides the Long Island

On Thanksgiving Eve, at the hour when all of New York seems to pour out of office buildings at once, and the gloomy and echoing caverns of Pennsylvania Station fill with people, two Long Island commuter trains gulped up their nightly rations of humanity. Their doors clanged shut. The Hempstead-bound 6:09 rattled out into the East River tunnel with 1,000 men and women jammed in the seats and aisles of its twelve cars. The Babylon-bound 6:13 pulled out behind it with 1,200 rush-hour passengers.

The passengers were part of a scarred, frustrated and endlessly complaining tribe —the 300,000 New York commuters who daily ride the rachitic, mismanaged Long Island Rail Road. They were also resigned. During a decade of endless criticism, the road's ramshackle trains—which link Long Island's sprawling suburbia to Manhattan and carry the biggest daily passenger load in the U.S.—had gone right on running late, bogging down in snowstorms, killing motorists at grade crossings and risking the lives of their passengers.

Thirty-two commuters had been killed last winter when two Long Island trains crashed head-on at Rockville Centre (TIME, Feb. 27). Wild and angry demands for reform had been raised, but the Long

Island, a bankrupt stepchild of the rich Pennsylvania Railroad, had done little to correct its miserable safety record. Still, most of its customers had no better means of transportation, so each day they hustled into crowded coaches like the 6:09 and the 6:13.

Rattling Dance. The two electric trains quickly emerged from the tunnel; then, for the better part of ten minutes they sped along, one behind the other, through the multi-windowed darkness of Queens.

Neither was scheduled to stop before Jamaica—the point at which twelve of the railroad's branch lines begin fanning out over the island. But when the leading 6:09 was still a mile from the station, an overhead block signal ordered a temporary halt and its motorman obediently applied his brakes. The train ground to a stop. But when the signal changed to "proceed," it refused to start; it groaned, lurched, and stalled dead on the tracks, apparently with its air brakes jammed.

Behind it the 6:13 rushed closer & closer, its coaches performing a rattling dance upon their trucks, its crowded passengers and their upraised newspapers swaying in rhythmic unison. Its engineer, a 55-year-old railroader named Benjamin Pokorney, fled past a stop signal 3,516 feet from the stalled 6:09 at 60 miles an hour, apparently gambling (as other engineers have before him) that the track ahead would clear in time. He had only 850 feet of rails left when his headlight told him the terrible truth.

He grabbed for his brakes, threw his motors into reverse—but he was too late. With a roar like an exploding artillery shell, the first car of the 6:13 buried itself, full length, in the last car of the 6:09. Both were crowded smokers; in one grinding and convulsive moment they were telescoped into a great steel package of mangled bodies, torn cushions, broken glass and twisted metal. Thin cries rose in the sudden silence.