DISASTER: Death Rides the Long Island

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Needles & Sparks. People rushing out of houses in the heavily populated city area along the tracks found themselves colliding in the dark with hundreds of people rushing out of the train. With no help at hand, dozens of dazed and bleeding survivors hurried off by themselves, like wounded animals, to make their own way to hospitals or homes. For minutes the tangled wreckage lay on the tracks as though it had been lost and forgotten, with only the roving flashlights of ladder-carrying householders to reveal glimpses of its horrors.

Then fire engines, police cars, ambulances and taxicabs began drawing up. Emergency floodlights bathed the shattered cars in an unearthly brilliance. Cops, firemen and workmen with big jacks scrambled toward the cars; doctors and nurses crept and crawled up ladders and into the wreckage, hypodermic needles in hand. Welders began to create their blinding cascades of sparks while firemen sprayed water past them to keep trapped humans from, burning. A jostling crowd gathered, a sound truck began rasping out commands.

The procession of dead and wounded seemed endless; men with stretchers pushed through the crowd to pile bodies in a nearby driveway, to carry the wounded to ambulances or into a nearby kitchen where surgeons operated on a table covered with bloody bedsheets. For 4½ hours the two telescoped smokers stayed stubbornly locked together while the living moaned inside and a dead man stared fixedly from one window; then two huge cranes lifted the upper car, revealing bodies and debris wedged and jammed almost immovably, and the litters were loaded anew.

Shock-waves of news spread across Queens and the outlying suburbs; hundreds of terrified wives began telephoning hospitals, newspapers and radio stations, and 3,000 men & women answering a radio appeal formed long queues at Mary Immaculate Hospital to donate blood. The news grew steadily worse. The next day, with the hospitals full, and the tracks cleared of all debris, the casualty list totaled 77 dead, more than 300 injured.

It was the worst U.S. railroad wreck since the Pennsylvania's Congressional Limited was derailed in Philadelphia in 1943, killing 79 people. More shocking, it brought the Long Island's death list for the year to 109, as many as had been killed in all U.S. crashes on scheduled U.S. airlines in 1950. New York's newly elected Mayor Vincent Impellitteri hurried home from Cuba to order an investigation. Governor Thomas E. Dewey—who had vetoed a legislative bill aimed at weeding out railroad engineers with bad safety records—called on the bankrupt line's two court-appointed trustees to resign. They stolidly refused. A wave of vehement indignation swept New York. Newspapers baldly used the word "murder" in editorials (see PRESS), and millions of shocked and frightened citizens cried, "Now they'll HAVE to do something."

The Nassau County Transit Commission charged that the Pennsylvania Railroad had milked the Long Island financially for years before allowing it to go into bankruptcy. It was primarily a passenger road with only a minor percentage of the freight business which swelled the coffers of other rail lines. Its equipment was junky and the morale of its 7,500 employees was as low as that of its passengers.