Rockville Centre train crash
New York
Two trains ran head-on into each other because construction had squeezed both directions onto a single shared rail bed.
On a February night in 1950, two Long Island Rail Road trains met head-on just west of Rockville Centre station. Construction was underway to lift the tracks onto an elevated viaduct, and for about two miles the right-of-way had narrowed to one gauntlet track. Eastbound and westbound trains took turns on it. Part of it sat on a curve. The eastbound train out of Penn Station carried around eight hundred passengers in twelve cars. It passed a red signal at Banks Avenue and kept going. The westbound train was moving at thirty miles an hour. Had it been going faster, it would have cleared the shared track before the other train entered it. They collided at 10:43 at night. The force split the first car of the westbound train in half. Thirty-two people died. The front cars of both trains were the smoking cars, and they were the most crowded, which is why so many were killed.
This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
the original line's right-of-way narrowed to one gauntlet track shared by both westbound and eastbound trains for about 2 miles (3.2 km), located partly on a curve
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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