A Terrifying Case of Mass Hysteria on the Ballard Line
A motorman and conductor abandoned their moving streetcar in fear, triggering a chaotic panic among passengers that led to multiple injuries.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Due to the desertion of their posts by the motorman and conductor of a West Street & North Ballard electric car, some twenty persons had a narrow escape from a headlong plunge over a bridge into the brush, twenty feet below. As it is, the car was only prevented from running away by the presence of mind of one of the passengers. One passenger was seriously injured and several others slightly injured.
Car No. 20 went down Mercer Street toward Ballard at 4:30 yesterday afternoon at about twelve miles an hour. When it approached the curve over the trestle bridge on Beach Street, the motorman found the controller would not work. He turned the emergency switch on the roof, but in doing so, he released the brake handle, increasing the car's speed. The conductor, fearing the car would jump the track, jumped from the rear platform, cutting himself over the eye. The motorman lost his head and jumped as well, followed by two passengers on the front platform.
Seeing the crew abandon ship, other passengers panicked. Miss Annie Anderson jumped, fell violently, and was picked up senseless with blood pouring from her ears. Another passenger, already nursing a fractured nose, broke the bone again. Mrs. Charles F. Blackburn jumped with a child in her arms and injured her back. Charles F. Blackburn then coolly stepped forward and set the brake hard, stopping the car and proving the scare had been needless. Miss Anderson was found to have a broken collarbone and a concussion.
“The conductor, seeing the car entering the curve at full speed, evidently feared that it would jump the track and go over the bridge, and so jumped from the rear platform, sprawling in the dust.”
The fear of 'runaway' transit is a recurring theme in urban history; just as the 1893 passengers feared the trestle, modern commuters often grapple with anxieties surrounding the reliability and safety of the city's rapidly expanding rail infrastructure.
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