Mystery Crash on the Interurban
A passenger train plows into a loaded freight car near O'Brien, leaving commuters shaken and investigators baffled.
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.
A collision between a passenger train running at 40 miles an hour and a loaded freight car occurred on the Interurban near O'Brien, 22 miles from Tacoma, at 9:45 o'clock last night. The vestibule of the forward car was smashed and the freight car was converted into kindling wood. When the motorman saw that a collision was unavoidable, he set the brakes and saved himself from injury by jumping just before the cars came together. None of the passengers were injured, but all were severely shaken up. Just how the accident occurred is a good deal of a mystery. Agent Franklin is at O'Brien making an investigation, but no official report has yet been made. One theory is that the switch from the main line to the sidetrack was left open, but the agent at O'Brien states positively that he closed the switch after the freight car was placed on the sidetrack.
“The vestibule of the forward car was smashed and the freight car was converted into kindling wood.”
O'Brien was a station on the Interurban line that connected Seattle and Tacoma, a route that would eventually be replaced by the modern highway corridors of Highway 99 and I-5. The mystery of the 'open switch' remains a classic industrial-age trope, highlighting the inherent danger of early 20th-century mass transit before modern automated safety systems.
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