Word: train
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Purring over the Southern Pacific's tracks toward parched Humboldt River Canyon, some 250 miles east of Reno, one night last week rolled the super-streamliner City of San Francisco. With her 17 sleek, buff cars, well-stocked bars, roomy lounges, the $2,000,000 train (owned jointly by Southern Pacific, Union Pacific and Chicago & North Western) was the nearest thing to a night club on wheels in U. S. transport. It was 10:30 p. m. Some of the 149 passengers were abed in pastel-shaded roomettes, but the club car was still comfortably full...
...seconds later Engineer Hecox felt the monster locomotive swerve. The locomotive and its two power cars ripped loose from the train, plunged bumping across the steel bridge, sideswiping telegraph poles, coming at last to a miraculous halt on the other side. But to all but four of the remaining cars came disaster. Six jumped the bridge, plunged 15 feet to the drying riverbed. One car was skewered by a steel girder. Bodies and bits of bodies blotted the wreckage...
...Cleveland last week, William Capps, a 19-year-old Negro from Somerset, Ky., hopped a freight train bound for Toledo, where he hoped to find work. Hanging on a ladder between box cars, he nodded. Suddenly he felt himself falling, grabbed wildly, caught a lower rung of the ladder. As he did so his left foot touched a spinning train wheel. The foot was pulled in and crushed between wheel top and car bottom...
...agony, William Capps hung on for about a quarter of a mile. Then he dropped from the train and crawled into a weed clump. His foot was a pulp and he was afraid of gangrene. Gritting his teeth, he pulled out his penknife, carefully cut off his foot, twisted his sweater around the stump to stop the bleeding...
...tree. In spite of pain and weakness he began hobbling along the tracks. What happened in the hours that followed no one knows. At the end of seven hours, a mile from the patch of weeds where he had left his amputated foot, he fell fainting before an astonished train crew...