The Deadly Train Wreck Of 1893

Jerry Banik

February, 2021

In 1893, a gruesome, head-on collision between two trains, sometimes referred to as the Colehour wreck, killed thirteen people and injured dozens more just outside of Roby. Like most tragedies, it should never have happened.  It was just one of many deadly incidents in the deplorable record of the U.S. railroad industry in the 1890’s.

Colehour is what people once called the South Chicago neighborhood we know today as Eastside.  Colehour was also the name of a railroad yard that still operates today, stretching along near Lake Michigan’s shoreline.  You see it on the north side of Indianapolis Boulevard in Roby as you drive into Chicago.

It’s easy to favor romanticized notions of what railroad travel was like in the 1800s, but the reality is that travel by rail in America back then was risky business.  Can you imagine sixteen fatal commercial airline crashes in a two month period in the U.S. today?  It’s unthinkable.  Yet during less than two months in 1893, from August 26 to October 21, there were sixteen fatal train collisions or derailments in the U.S., killing 140 people.

In 1893 the Columbian Exposition, Chicago’s great World’s Fair, was in full swing in Jackson Park, less than ten miles from Whiting as the crow flies. Unsurpassed railroad service had been an important factor in convincing Congress to select Chicago as the host city, and the budding Calumet Region was laced with railroads.  Hundreds of thousands of visitors were passing through our area, into and out of Chicago, by way of a spaghetti bowl of train tracks shared by both passenger and freight trains.

In anticipation of the extra World’s Fair traffic, the Pennsylvania Railroad had acquired rights to a single-track line that ran between Colehour and Hegewisch.  It connected two existing, double-track main lines and was being used to help spread out the extra World’s Fair traffic.

On the morning of September 7, a dispatcher at the Colehour rail yard was about to find himself caught up in the middle of a catastrophe on that connecting line.

At 8:00 A.M. that morning the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad, commonly known as the Panhandle Line, sent out a passenger train it called the “Louisville Express” from Chicago’s Union Depot, headed for Kentucky.  It was routed through the Colehour neighborhood and then, when it reached the Colehour Yard, it was to swing south onto the single-track connecting line, skirt the Illinois side of Wolf Lake down to Hegewisch, cut into Hammond onto double-track line, and continue its journey southward.

That same morning a train of the Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Fort Wayne (PC&FW) Railroad left Valparaiso headed for Chicago with a cargo of milk, chickens and passengers.  The milk train followed its usual route through Hammond into Hegewisch, and swung north onto the same single-track connector that the Panhandle train to Louisville would be using to go south.  If it were not for the extra World’s Fair traffic the Panhandle and the PC&FW trains would have traveled separate lines.

Both trains were under control of the Pennsylvania Railroad System, and it was the job of the Pennsylvania dispatchers at Fort Wayne to make sure the two trains were never to be on the same stretch of single track at the same time.

It had been arranged for the milk train to be given the right-of-way. The dispatchers at the Colehour Yard were to be instructed to stop the Panhandle’s Louisville Express and hold it on Colehour’s double track until after the Chicago-bound milk train passed by. Unfortunately, Fort Wayne never transmitted the stop-and-hold order to Colehour. A brakeman on the Louisville Express would later testify that his train did stop at Colehour for instructions, but because none had been received, they headed south, onto the single track, without holding. Meanwhile the milk train to Chicago, thinking the track was clear, was barreling north, trying to get past Colehour without making the Louisville Express wait too long.

Somewhere near what is now 110th Street in Illinois the two trains met, roughly several hundred yards west of where our Walmart superstore stands today.  The spot was close to the Roby Racetrack and the brand new Columbian Athletic Club, which had hosted its first prize fight only three weeks earlier.  There, on a stretch of track that curved behind a clump of trees, the two trains, each estimated to be traveling at 35 to 40 miles per hour, ran straight into each other.  Neither saw the other coming until it was too late.  The engine crews of both trains jumped out to save their lives before the locomotives smashed together.

The baggage car of the Panhandle’s Louisville Express was forced up and through the smoking car behind it, coming down through its roof.  In 1893 the area around the accident was sparsely inhabited, and, as a result, help was slow to arrive.  Every person riding in the smoking car was either killed or injured.

In the sensational journalistic style of the time, newspapers described the awful scene.  The engine of the milk train “crumbled away like paper and fell into a ditch alongside the track. Two bodies from the milk train shot in the air and turned a somersault before they reached the soft sand.”

The grisly reports were the stuff of nightmares.  “The cries of the dying were terrible to hear.  Some of the wounded prayed that an end would be put to their misery, while others moaned and shrieked in their agony.  Blood from those mangled made puddles of red in the sand.”  In the wreckage “could be seen an arm, a crushed and mangled head, a face, and an already discolored body.”  The steam released by the engine’s damaged boiler “sizzled down into the debris of the wreck” and many who were not killed outright “screamed with pain as their flesh was cooked away. The most horrible sight was a mass of human remains that was dashed against the tender of the Panhandle locomotive.  It had once been a man.  Some said he was a tramp and that he had been stealing a ride on the blind baggage platform.”

For days the human toll of the disaster played out in newspaper stories.  The train’s baggage master, a husband and father of three children, was severely injured, and had his left leg amputated below the hip.  A train newsboy had his right foot amputated.  A man from Carthage, Indiana, a tiny town near Indianapolis, was headed home from his job at the Indiana State Building at the World’s Fair, and now was among the dead.  A young boy had been traveling on the same seat as an old man at the time of the crash.  At first the boy could not be found.  When he was, he lay dying, and “the old man was frantic with grief.”  The death of passenger Anson Temple “caused profound sorrow in Chicago.  He was one of the best known and popular latter-day theatrical managers...his name had become a household word in theatrical circles throughout the country...He leaves a widow and two children.”

The mayor of Kokomo, who with his wife was returning from the World’s Fair, had been in a passenger car further back in the Panhandle train and was not injured.  He told heartbreaking stories to the press.

“Arms, legs and mangled bodies were visible everywhere.  I could not begin to describe the awfulness of the scene.  There were two girls on the train having a brother in the smoker.  Going to the wrecked car they called the name of their brother, and receiving no answer, their cries were pitiable and heart rending.  The brother was crushed to death and mutilated almost beyond recognition.” 

Another passenger, Michael Vale, lay mortally injured, and asked the Mayor to telegraph his wife, which the Mayor later did.

The dead were placed on a dray, covered with straw, and taken to a farmhouse along with some of the injured.  The farmhouse was said to be that of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Roby, who lived on 108th Street, and who, with their son, were among the first on the scene.

After the accident the Colehour Yard dispatcher, A. R. Kennedy, had been quickly arrested on the suspicion that he might have failed to follow instructions from Fort Wayne.  A spokesman for the Pennsylvania Railroad announced that an investigation would be made at once.  “It was,” he said, “a clear, open and shut case of negligence.  There will be not much trouble in fixing the responsibility.”  The investigation that ensued revealed that two, not one, Panhandle trains set out from Chicago on the same route that fateful morning, and Fort Wayne had only instructed dispatcher Kennedy to stop and hold one of them, which he did.  He explained that having no instructions regarding the second Panhandle train, the Louisville Express, “I was compelled to let her go.” He was fully exonerated.

Initially the Fort Wayne dispatcher who failed to transmit the necessary stop order vanished.  Rumors spread that he had fled to Canada, having gone mad with grief and shame.  He eventually reappeared and cooperated with the investigation, acknowledging that, when he was about to telegraph the stop order to Colehour, he was temporarily distracted, and only later realized that he never sent the message.

The connecting line on which the wreck took place has long been abandoned.  In the late 1990s the Chicago Park District created a greenway with a bicycle path on the stretch of the railroad right-of-way on which the wreck occurred.  Today it is known as John Beniac Greenway Park.