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The head cars plowed along each other's flanks, peeling back the sides with a shriek of tearing metal, rolling up steel, seats, hats, briefcases, newspapers, human bodies into two great, tortured wads of debris at the ends of the cars. The second car of No. 175 buckled, jumped the track and fell against the embankment of the new overpass. The trains came to a standstill in a second of dark and shuddering silence.
The Nightmare. Stunned by the dreadful roar of the collision, Mrs. Evelyn Mc-Tootle, proprietress of the nearby Sunset Inn Bar & Grill, thought "a boiler was blowing up." She ran out to the street. A conductor jumped out of one of the trains and yelled at her to turn in an alarm. Mrs. McTootle did as she was told, then filled a cooking pot with water and made for the wreck.
The night had split open into horror and confusion. Men & women trapped in the cars screamed to be let out. Some managed to crawl through smashed windows and stagger aimlessly into the darkness.
The wails of fire sirens sounded through Rockville Centre. Townspeople ran toward the tracks and stood there, staring in frozen horror. Police and firemen began working their way through the wreckage, climbing over the cars, battering and prying with crowbars and sledge hammers. Soon, floodlights whitely bathed the scene. A crowd of 30,000 watched from the trackside.
Welders burned their way through twisted steel. Doctors crawled after them, administering morphine, amputating limbs to extricate still breathing people. A man impaled on a steel beam pleaded for someone to kill him.
Rescuers, smeared with blood, lifted out the living and the dead, and the parts of bodies and the briefcases and the clothing. A man sat by a shattered window looking, as one rescuer later recalled, "like he was going on a trip—but the top of his head was cut off." Some bodies had been decapitated; others, living and dead, were smashed and twisted between the ragged chunks of broken steel.
The Dead. It was six hours after the crash before the last survivor or corpse was lifted from the wreckage.
They laid the dead in the little Negro Second Baptist Church beside the tracks. Mrs. McTootle, padding through .the nightmare, still carrying water from her kitchen, remembered, "There was blood all over the floor. In one corner was a shoe with a foot in it."
Sickened friends and relatives identified the remains—Raymond Miller, who had just missed the 9:03, Martin Steeil, John Weeks, 26 others who had been in the head cars of No. 192 and No. 175. More than 100 were injured, many critically. It was the bankrupt Long Island's worst wreck, and the worst railroad wreck in the U.S. since April 1946, when 45 were killed on the Burlington Railroad at Naperville, Ill.
This week the Public Service Commission began its investigation. Both motormen, who had been riding in their cubicles on the comparatively intact right sides of the two cars, had survived. Markin had only minor injuries. Kiefer, apparently thrown clear, was suffering from severe shock. A veteran engineman of 26 years service, 55-year-old Jacob Kiefer was arrested and charged with criminal negligence.