Why?

Near the whistle-stop of Buies, N.C., a rail snapped. Couplings shook, cars teetered, the train jerked to a stop. The last three cars of the Atlantic Coast Line's Florida-bound Tamiami West Coast Champion were derailed, left hanging, tentatively, at a 45DEG angle over the northbound track.

Outside, a sleet storm had stopped, but the night air was cold--bitter cold for North Carolina. Some passengers climbed out and up the sleet-crusted embankments, but most stayed in the train. Two southbound freight trains screeched to a halt behind the wreck. One man had been killed.

If this had been all that happened, it would have amounted to no more than an unfortunate but minor railroad accident. What followed may go down as one of the most grotesquely needless tragedies in railroad history.

Numbed Bodies. A full 35 minutes after the accident, passengers huddled atop the embankments heard an ominous sound. Up the northbound track, at a full 90 m.p.h., roared the Tamiami East Coast Champion, heading straight into the derailed cars. There was a sickening screech, a clattering crash; then stillness and, finally, the small cries of the hurt and dying.

An expectant mother, her legs and thighs crushed, moaned in the darkness: "I won't lose my baby. I won't lose my baby. God help me, I won't." A doctor rushed to her side, gave her a sedative, told her her baby would be born. "Thank God," she said.

Rescuers picked their way among crushed, decapitated, legless bodies. When medical help arrived, the water froze in the syringes which held pain-killing drugs. Forty-eight hours later, after the wreckage had been cut through by acetylene torches, after a warehouse at Red Springs was piled high with bodies, the death toll stood at 72, including 52 servicemen, most of them home-bound for Christmas.* The injured: more than 60.

Numbed Senses. Nobody had a rational explanation for the catastrophe. Nobody seemed to know why warning torpedoes had not been placed on the northbound track. The railroad explained that the West Coast Champion's fireman had gone down the track to set a fusee, had stumbled and destroyed his only one. Passengers then lit newspapers.

But the East Coast Champion's engineer, who survived the crash, had seen no warning signal.

*At the warehouse-morgue, reporters found the doors barred by soldiers with machine guns. Newsmen on the scene suddenly found Army M.P.s imposing a strict censorship: an A.P. cameraman was arrested, a Red Cross photographer had all his film destroyed. The M.P.s had stupidly followed the line of an A.C.L. district chief, who said the railroad did not want "that kind of publicity." A terse directive from the War Department told the M.P.s to stop meddling.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.