{"id":6887,"date":"2018-02-27T18:30:30","date_gmt":"2018-02-28T00:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=6887"},"modified":"2023-12-10T17:49:38","modified_gmt":"2023-12-10T23:49:38","slug":"morbid-fact-du-jour-for-february-27-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=6887","title":{"rendered":"Morbid Fact Du Jour for February 27, 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s Blood-Soaked Yet Truly Morbid Fact!<\/h3>\n

New York’s\u00a0Metropolitan Transportation Agency (MTA)\u00a0might never have existed had it not been for one nightmare Wednesday in 1950. On Thanksgiving eve, the commute home was well under way. Thousands of train riders were heading from Penn Station back to Long Island, anticipating the long holiday weekend. Then came the screech of steel against steel \u2014 and the worst accident in Long Island Railroad (LIRR) history.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a scene of utter horror,\u201d a reporter wrote of the carnage he witnessed after a Babylon-bound train rear-ended a disabled locomotive, which had been headed for Hempstead, just east of Kew Gardens, Queens.\u00a0 Nearly 80 riders were crushed to death.<\/p>\n

The mammoth crash of the two trains, then part of the privately owned Pennsylvania Railroad system, is rarely talked about today. No memorial marks the spot. But at the time, the crash was so horrific that it sparked a series of government takeovers, eventually forging the giant public authority known as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.<\/p>\n

Susan Nelson says her father responded to the blood-soaked scene that night as a member of the NYPD\u2019s first paramedic unit.\u00a0 \u201cMy father distinctly remembered a gentleman sitting in a seat, holding a bouquet of flowers,\u201d Nelson, 58, recently recalled to The Post, referring to her late dad, Andrew W. Eyell. \u201cHe said when he went up to talk to [the man], he realized he\u2019d been severed in half, his top from his bottom. He was just sitting there, holding a bouquet of flowers as if he was asleep.\u201d<\/p>\n

The outcry over the incident was near-instantaneous. \u201cPeople were furious,\u201d said CUNY historian and librarian Derek Stadler, who has written about the horror and its aftermath. \u201cHow could something like this happen?\u201d<\/p>\n

It was the second massive fatal crash for the railroad that year. On Feb. 17, 1950, 32 passengers perished when two LIRR trains collided head-on. Another crash occurred on Aug. 5 that year when an LIRR train ran through an open switch near the Huntington station and smashed into a sidelined freight train. No one was killed, but 46 passengers were injured.\u00a0Then there was the Thanksgiving-eve horror.<\/p>\n

It was a mechanical problem \u2014 typical to the LIRR and the nation\u2019s other railroads, all straining under the pressure of decreased ridership during the rising reign of the automobile \u2014 that set the Thanksgiving-eve crash in motion.<\/p>\n

Train 780 from Penn Station to Hempstead had just passed through Kew Gardens, its seats and aisles packed with 1,000 commuters. The motorman saw a caution signal ahead. He pumped the air brakes. But the brakes jammed. The rear brakeman was sent outside to stand behind the train with a red lantern, to warn any approaching trains.<\/p>\n

But soon, he heard his train powering back up. \u201cHe thought the braking problem was solved and the train was about to get under way,\u201d according to a comprehensive 2010 account by the Kew Gardens Civic Association. \u201cSo he extinguished the lantern and reboarded the rear car. That was a mistake,\u201d it says. The brakes on the Hempstead train were still jammed.<\/p>\n

It was around 6:30 p.m., the height of rush hour, a time when eastbound commuter traffic was four times heavier than during off-peak hours. \u201cProbably seconds after the brakeman extinguished the warning lantern, a New York-to-Babylon train came around the bend about 4,600 feet back,\u201d according to the account on KewGardensHistory.com. The oncoming Babylon train\u2019s motorman saw a \u201cGo Slow\u201d signal due to the congestion ahead and cut speed to about 15 mph.\u00a0 But then he caught sight of a second signal a half-mile ahead showing \u201call clear.\u201d\u00a0 So he sped up.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt never dawned on him that the \u2018all clear\u2019 signal was meant for the Hempstead train stalled in darkness only a third of a mile ahead,\u201d according to the account. The Babylon train was going around 35 mph when the motorman saw the Hempstead train\u2019s tiny red \u201cmarker lights,\u201d and by then, it was too late. \u201cIn the last seconds of his life, the motorman of the Babylon train had tried to apply his emergency brakes,\u201d the account says. \u201cHe succeeded only in slowing the Babylon train to about 30 mph before impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

The brakeman from the stalled Hempstead train, meanwhile, had realized that his train wasn\u2019t ready to get under way after all.\u00a0 At the moment of collision, he had just stepped back off the train, a move that saved his life. \u201cThe rear brakeman,\u201d notes the account, \u201cwas injured but survived.\u201d<\/p>\n

One image from the carnage stood out to a United Press reporter: a head that jutted from a window of the train wreckage. Wide-eyed, and streaked with blood, it would stare lifelessly at rescuers as they struggled to reach the faint cries of \u201chelp\u201d from those imprisoned inside. \u201cThat horror-stricken mask stared at clawing workmen for four hours,\u201d recalled the reporter, John Marka.<\/p>\n

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\u201cDoctors hung precariously from ladders, from windows of the train, and they perched upon bent girders holding plasma bottles whose little red tubes fed to within the mass of steel where the injured lay pinned. Sturdy arms would reach into the twisted steel and pull out the body,\u201d Marka wrote. \u201cThey carried out a man who smiled after they amputated his leg to free him,\u201d Marka wrote. \u201c[Then] they carried out just a leg.\u201d<\/p>\n

On impact, the front car of the oncoming train and the back car of the stalled train had fused into a single mass of twisted metal and trapped bodies.\u00a0A witness described seeing riders \u201cpacked like sardines, in their own blood.\u201d It would take all night, in freezing weather, for emergency workers \u2014 working by floodlight with acetylene-fueled cutting torches and wooden ladders \u2014 to free the survivors and pull the 78 dead men and women from the wreckage.<\/p>\n

Additional photos of the aftermath of the crash:
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Culled from:\u00a0New York Post<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sideshow “Freak” Du Jour!<\/h3>\n

Willis Carver was born in 1868. His career apparently began at the age of twelve when he spent the 1880 season with both the Van Arnburgh & Co. Circus and Menageries and Dan Rice’s Circus. The following year he joined the Pullman and Hamilton Circus; in 1884 he toured with the famous Sells Brothers’ Show. Willis also worked the dime museum circuit. He appeared in Kohl and Middleton’s Museum and was presumably photographed by Chas. Eisenmann (who took the photos below) while booked into New York’s Morris & Hickman Museum in 1882.<\/p>\n

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In the 1880s young Willis always appeared with his mother who billed herself somewhat grandly as Madame Carver. Although she had many Eisenmann\u00a0carte de visites<\/em>\u00a0made of herself Willis was never photographed alone.<\/p>\n

Here he stands between his mother and father, both of whom are obviously normal. This fact, along with Willis’s short arms, small face and slight swayback, evident in the other photographs, suggest he was a Russel-Silver dwarf – the victim of intrauterine growth retardation – rather than a true genetic dwarf.<\/p>\n

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Culled from:\u00a0Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s Blood-Soaked Yet Truly Morbid Fact! New York’s\u00a0Metropolitan Transportation Agency (MTA)\u00a0might never have existed had it not been for one nightmare Wednesday in 1950. On Thanksgiving eve, the commute home was well under way. Thousands of train riders were heading from Penn Station back to Long Island, anticipating the long holiday weekend. Then came the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-facts","category-freaks"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6887"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11056,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6887\/revisions\/11056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}