Tragedy on the Interurban Tracks
A man loses his life in an accident near Fife, highlighting the dangers of the era's expanding rail infrastructure.
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.
Peter Napoleon, an Indigenous man, was struck by an Interurban train near Fife yesterday morning and died at 3:30 o'clock this morning at the Fannie Paddock hospital. Napoleon was lying asleep on the track when the motorman discovered him too late to stop. The train struck him with enough force to hurl him into the bushes. He was brought to the hospital with severe head injuries and a severed arm. Frank Jake, initially reported as a companion, is also in the hospital with a broken collarbone, though he claims he had not seen Napoleon since Saturday evening and that the injury resulted from a sidewalk accident.
“The train struck the body with a force that hurled it quite a distance into the bushes.”
Accidents involving rail lines were a frequent, grim reality during the rapid expansion of Tacoma's transit systems. Today, Fife and the surrounding areas have replaced these hazardous, open-track corridors with highly regulated light rail and industrial corridors, though the intersection of transit and unhoused residents remains a hauntingly similar civic struggle.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.