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.
Up in the cab of the Diesel-powered locomotive, Engineer Edward Hecox, who had driven the flyer ever since she started her regular 39 ¼-hour Chicago-San Francisco run in 1938, watched for the steeply palisaded curve near Humboldt River bridge. Nearing the curve, he throttled down to 60 m. p. h.
Few 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.
Racing wildly down the track, Engineer Hecox reached a telephone an hour later. When rescuers arrived by special trains and motor, 20 were dead, 60 injured.
Next day Engineer Hecox told Eureka County coroner's jury a hair-raising tale. He said he had spotted a green tumbleweed covering the spot where his locomotive had run amok. Beneath, the rails had been loosened.
The jury's verdict: ''To the best of our belief . . . [the rail] was misplaced by a person or persons unknown."
After the crash, an "earless man" peered over the brim of a nearby gully, fled when hailed. Police rounded up suspicious characters, trapped one ''earless man" who admitted hating railroads but who had an alibi. The search went on, also, for a sot who cursed the railroads in a saloon, finally got so mad he set fire to his cap and threw it at bystanding Chinese.
Among the City of San Francisco's survivors was Industrialist Horace Disston (Henry Disston & Sons, saw manufacturers), who had told friends he preferred trains to planes "for safety's sake." Eighteen hours later, Pan American's Sikorsky 543 ("Baby Clipper"), out of Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, was heading for Rio de Janeiro's naval dock. The bay, Pan Am's usual landing place, was clogged with pleasure craft. But seasoned Pilot A. G. Person confidently swung his ship around for a landing farther out. His twelve passengers, after a smooth and uneventful flight, were fumbling for their belongings when CRACK, the amphibian, turning sharply, struck a gate on the dock. Instantly she broke in two, her fuel took fire. When shore witnesses reached her floating remains, dead were her four crew members, nine of her twelve passengers (one died later in the hospital), including famed Yale Economist James Harvey Rogers, onetime New Deal Brain-truster.