Newport weekly independent., 1901-04-25
A FRIGHTFUL COLLISION.
Five Persons Killed and Forty Injured by Collision of Rapidly Running
 Trolley Cars.

Albany, N. Y. May Electric cars racing for a switch while rum ming in opposite directions at the rate of 40 miles an hour cost five lives, yes terday afternoon, by terrific colli- sion in which over forty prominent people were injured, some fatally and others seriously.
 The lcbby of the local post office filled with dead and wounded; hys- terical women and children looking for relatives and friends; surgeons, administering temporary relief, and ambulances racing through the city, taking the wounded to hospitals. were the early intimatons of the accident
 The scene of the accident was d point two miles out of Greenbush, on the line of the Albany & Hudson railway. The point where the cars met on the single track was at d sharp curve, and so fast were both running, and so sudden was the colli- sion, that the motormen never had time to put on the brakes before south-bound car No. 22 had gone al-
 
 No. IT, and hung on the edge of high bluff, with it's load of shrieking, maimed humanity.
 One motorman was pinioned up against he smashed front of the south-bound car with both legs sev- cred, and killed instantly, while the other lived but few minutes.
 Fully 12o men, women and children formed struggling, shreking pyra- md, mixed with blood, detached por4 tions of human bodies and the wreck age of the ears.
 Some of the more slightly injured of the men extricated themselves and began to pull people out of the rear ends of the two cars, and almost ev- eryone vas taken out in this way and nearly all were badly injured.
 The few women and children who had escaped injury and death were hysterical, and added their cries to the shrieks of the dying and muti- lated.
 Men, with broken arms and bones, dislocated joints and bloody heads and faces, tried to assist others who were more helpless.
 Help had been summoned from East Greenbush and vicinity, and in a lit- tie time the bruised mass of human ity, with the mutilated dead for a gruesome company, were loaded on extra cars and taken to Albany There smbulances and physicians had been summoned, and the post office turned into norgue and hospital. As fast as the physicians could temporarily fix up the wounded they were taken to their homes or to hospitals
 With both motormen killed it was hard to get at the real cause of the accident, but it is pretty we'll de- termined that it was caused by an at tempt of the south-bound car to reach second switch instead of waiting fo- the north-bound car at the first sid- ing.
 The cars weigh 15 tons each, and are the largest electric cars built, but so frightfui was the crash that both ears We're torn almost to splinters. Both cars were filled with pleasure seekers returning from the new recre- ation grounds that the railway had just opened. The south bound car left Albany at 4:30 o'clock and the acci- dent occurred at five o'clock.
 The ears on the line were running at switch headway-th that is, as car reached a siding switch it was SUD- posed to wait until another going iE the opposite direction, passed The motorman of the south-bound car reached one of the switches but see ing no nortL-bound car, decided to take chances and go to the next sid- ing. It was at curve between that the two cars met.