Sunday School Picnic Ends in Tragedy
A streetcar carrying Sunday school students plunged down a twenty-foot embankment in Seattle after losing control on a steep grade.
A streetcar loaded with Sunday school picnickers from Ballard got beyond the control of the motorman on the grade from Fremont, a Seattle suburb, this morning. The car jumped the track on a sharp curve, plunged down a twenty-foot embankment, and turned over. One woman was fatally injured, and a dozen children were seriously hurt. The fatally injured are Mrs. Olsen and Mrs. Mary Eggen.
“The car jumped the track on a sharp curve, plunged down a twenty-foot embankment and then turned over.”
Early 20th-century urban transit was often treacherous, with 'runaway car' accidents serving as a common civic trauma. Today, these neighborhoods—Fremont and Ballard—have been fully integrated into a dense, modernized urban grid, but the danger of navigating Seattle’s steep topography remains a recurring theme in local transportation planning.
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