Wreckingest

In the blackness before dawn, the Silver Meteor streaked through the South Carolina pine barren. In its Pullmans and dim-lit coaches, most of its capacity load of passengers were asleep. The three Diesel-powered locomotives which make it the fastest of the Seaboard Air Line's New York-Miami trains had a clear stretch of track toward that day's sunny warmth in Florida.

Then something happened. The second engine began to plow up track and ties. A broken rail speared through the third engine. Like a wounded giant it veered crazily, then rolled down 75 feet of embankment, jerked five of the train's 17 cars with it.

In the first coach back of the engine, Alonzo Wilson, a New York City Negro, woke up to a nightmare of din and confusion. In one flashing instant before the lights went out he saw his wife and baby daughter crushed to death between seats that moved together like the jaws of a vise. Somehow, they were the only persons killed. But 23 were injured.

Thus 1946 took up where 1945 had left off--and in the same area. Only 16 nights before, only 64 miles to the north, the Seaboard's west coast Silver Meteor had knifed into cars of the northbound Sun Queen, killing six, injuring 62. Seventy-two hours later, a Southern Railway freight had piled up on the rear of a New Orleans-New York limited, killing three.

In seven months there had been eight passenger train pile-ups on the three main lines running down the east coast to Florida resorts--the Seaboard, Atlantic Coast Line and Florida East Coast Railway. Three of the wrecks were in North and South Carolina, where the swift streamliners slide through the night.

In James Boyd's Marching On, a novel of the South in the 1860s, Big Bill the Brakeman, who rode the historic Wilmington-Weldon (N.C.) run, bragged that he worked on "the wreckingest road in the Union." The Carolinas were beginning to wonder if they were getting to be the wreckingest states.

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