Crash at Dunkirk

It was 10:18 at night. In a railway control tower at Dunkirk, Ohio, Operator Cliff Schwartzkopf waited for the Pennsylvania's Pennsylvanian, eastbound from Chicago to New York.

Through the light snowfall, he saw the Pennsylvanian's headlight coming toward him at some 70 miles an hour. Suddenly, from a passing freight train, a half-ton cylinder head was blown from the locomotive, landed squarely on the track before the oncoming express. From his tower Schwartzkopf saw the Pennsylvanian's headlight weaving and rocking. The locomotive left the rails, skidded on its side 200 feet to crash into the control tower.

Schwartzkopf, dazed but unhurt, found himself on the tracks, the wreckage piled around him, the control tower aflame. A coach had sheared against the locomotive as if a knife had cut it down the middle. The Pennsylvanian's fireman and at least eleven others were dead; 42 or more were injured. The engineer lost an arm. An hour after the wreck a Chicago advertising man discovered that he still held in his hand the bridge cards he had been ready to play when the train left the tracks.

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