page_title: Esmond Train Wreck
section_title: Wreck rediscovery
hierarchical_section_title: Esmond Train Wreck / Wreck rediscovery
caption_attribution_description: English: Map detail southwest of Tucson, Arizona from Hardesty's Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia New York: H.H. Hardesty &amp; Company, 1883
context_page_description: The Esmond Train Wreck on January 28, 1903, 3:30 am, about 9 miles east of present-day Tucson, Arizona, killed 14 people, including the engineers of both trains. The accident occurred when the eastbound Crescent City Express collided head-on with the westbound Pacific Coast Express. Both trains were running late. A communication error was determined to be the cause of the wreck. A night operator named Clough admitted that he did not deliver a second order to Conductor Parker which instructed him to pull the Crescent City Express, headed for New Orleans, on to the Esmond siding to allow the Pacific Coast Express, headed for San Francisco, to pass by.
context_section_description: Several local amateur historians began searching for the location of the accident in 1999. David Kemsley and Tom Zumwalde were intrigued by the name of a dirt road, “Esmond Station Road”, off Houghton Road. They found a few references to the Esmond Train Station, later renamed the Papago Train Station. The “Esmond Station Area Plan” revealed the prior existence of the Esmond Station and a train wreck.
  The inventory and Plan areas are named for Esmond Station, a former railroad section station located on Rita Road about one-half mile east of Houghton Road. A head-on collision of two passenger trains occurred near this site in 1903. Portions of the original structures still remain, and the possibility of designating Esmond Station as a historic site is being investigated.
  They also found a reference to it in “Railroads of Arizona: Vol. 1 The Roads of Southern Arizona" (1975), which referred to a "famous head-on collision took place about three in the morning of January 28, 1903, just west of Esmond, a station about 15 miles east of Tucson. Newspaper account initially blamed the train operator and later then conductor. Douglas Maus found a large, heavy metal strut embedded in the dirt that appeared to have been torn from one of the train engines. The researchers received input from Richard Jones who directed them to a number of photos of the wreck at the Arizona Historical Society Library.
caption: Papago Station, the site of the Esmond train wreck, on the rail line southwest of Tucson on this 1883 map.
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