Vilas County news. [volume] (Eagle River, Vilas County, Wis.) 1896-1927, 1916-04-05
DEATH LIST IS Is
IN BIG RAIL WRECK
Forty Others Hurt in Triple Crash
Near Amherst, 0.
,TOWERMAN MAY BE BLAMED
Attempted to Care for Sick Wife and
Attend to Duties Without Sleep
Three Investigations Are
Necessary.

Cleveland, u, MarCn 0U.-SCdIe, leu
eraI and railroad investigation of the
double wreck on the Lake Shore rail-
road at Amherst, o., near here, which
cost the lives of fully twenty-six per-
sons and injured forty, was begun
here.
Railroad officers declare the blame
for the crash which piled up the
Twentieth Century flyer and two other
crack Lake Shore passenger trains in
to a tangled heap of junk probably
will be shared by two railroad en-
ployees.
How Wreck Occurred.
The railroad company, in an official
statement explaining the wreck, de-
clared the first section of train No. sc,
after stopping at the interlocking
tower at Amherst, had started ahead
at five or ten miles an hour. The Sec
ond section ran into the first. Two
rear cars Of the first section fell over
on the west-bound track just as the
Twentieth Century Limited, bound for
Chicago, was approaching. The TWEEN
tieth Century collided with part of the
WT6ChdBo OH IuG W6SI-OOuAO lAdNh0'
The Twentieth Century was derailed
except for the three rear cars. All Of
the passengers killed or seriously hurt
were in the rear car of the first Sec
ton of train No. sc.
While relief parties were still dig
ging dead bodies from the debris and
doctors and nurses were rescuing
incr
manned victims, the Investigations
were begun. Two men stood out as
shaken, tragic figures that had swift
ly become the objects of cross-fire in
vestigation, luckless enough to have
been actors in the melodramatic spec
tacle, which sprang out of the fog of
early morning hours.
Towernan May Get Blame.
Survivors of the disaster streamed
into Cleveland as port Of refuge all
day, bringing with them tales of hor-
ror and of magic escapes. Grim scenes
they had witnessed shocked and stupe-
fled women among them and stunned
men.
Survivors Go to Cleveland.
One is a towerman, Ernst, doing
in his lonely cupola as speeding trains
slid by him-a man trying to perform
his duties of watching over thousands
of lives in the railroads care and I'M
der the handicap of sleepless hours
caring for his wife, who Sunday had
given birth to a baby. The other is
Herman Hess, engineer of the second
section of the east-bound flyer, who
escaped from the cab of his engine
after it had plowed into the first sec
tion-a man who saw no red warning
signal through the fog and relied upon
the mysteriously halted first train.
These are the men who became the
center of an investigation by New
York Central officers, led by General
Superintendent A. S. ingalls,. A coin
cidental inquiry was begun by Coro-
ner Carver of Lorain county, while
State Railroad Inspectors Packard and
Heffernan rushed to the scene to con-
duct the state public utilities inquiry,
and Safety Experts Belknap, Ellis and
McAdam started for Amherst to begin
a federal investigation for the inter,
state commerce commission.
20 Bodies Recovered.
Out of the chaos at the spot a mile
out of Amherst rescue parties spent a
struggling day taking bodies out of
the debris. Twenty-six were recov-
cred, but others were believed to have
remained hidden under the tons of
wreckage strewn over four tracks and
reared thirty feet in the air.
Twenty-Five bodies are packed in
morgue at Amherst, two are dead at
Elyria Memorial hospital, and two are
dead at Lorain. Eighteen have been
identified. Of the other eight, all in
the Amherst morgue, six are men and
two are women.
Many in Hospitals.
Scattered over many miles are men,
women and children suffering with
serious injuries or minor hurts. They
are in hospitals in Elyria and Lorain,
a few miles away, in houses thrown
open for succor by people in the vii
lage of Amherst and farmers near by,
in Cleveland hotels and in relatives
homes.
And many, escaping wholly or in
part, scattered East and West, hurry
ing from the scene as if driven by a
combination of dread and thankfulness
to put miles between themselves and
the spot where so many lives were
crushed out.
Indescribable confusion existed for
hours as hundreds plunged into the
rescue work Identification of bodies,
torn and mangled, remained a puzzle
that more than once resulted in the
names of survivors being coupled with