It was business as usual at Naperville’s Kroehler Furniture factory early one April afternoon in 1946 when the customary routine was punctured by a thunderous boom, followed by momentary silence, then screams and cries for help. Outside the Kroehler factory, a CB&Q passenger train plowed into the rear of a stopped train, in the single most deadly train accident ever experienced in the towns along the Q.
At 1:03 p.m. on Thursday, April 25, 1946, CB&Q train number #11, the Advance Flyer made an unscheduled, emergency stop at the Loomis Street crossing, next to the Kroehler Factory in Naperville. Less than three minutes later train #39, the Exposition Flyer, overran a stop signal and rammed the Advance Flyer at a speed of forty-five miles per hour. The streamlined locomotive of the second train sliced through the rear car of the Advance Flyer like it was peeling a banana, killing forty-five and injuring another 150 passengers or employees.
Hundreds of Kroehler workers rushed out to the wreckage to help. Some built scaffolding to reach trapped passengers. Others formed escort lines to guide victims into the Kroehler building or nearby homes. A temporary hospital was set up in a Kroehler warehouse. Newly produced sleeper-sofas were deployed as makeshift hospital beds. A temporary morgue was set up in the factory. Secretaries sent telegrams to passengers’ families and friends. The Kroehler cafeteria staff prepared sandwiches for victims and rescue workers. Other aid stations were established in nearby homes. One home served as the communications center. A marine, visiting his sister on Center Street in Naperville, spent eight hours assisting the most critically injured. One passenger, a veteran of numerous naval battles in World War II, travelling to his home in Council Bluffs, Iowa, helped carry out seventeen of the dead. Students from nearby North Central College and Evangelical Theological Seminary provided comfort to the injured. Three Roman Catholic priests comforted victims and administered last rites where necessary.
First responders: doctors, nurses and ambulances raced to the scene from Naperville, Aurora, Hinsdale, Downers Grove and other communities. CB&Q dispatched its own rescue train from Chicago. Workers used acetylene torches to cut through the crumpled and twisted metal to reach the dead and injured. Thirty passengers or train crew members sustained injuries serious enough to warrant hospitalization. As there was as yet no hospital or trauma center in Naperville, the victims were transported to hospitals in Aurora, nine miles away.
Aboard the Advance Flyer and Exposition Flyer that afternoon were about 400 passengers. Many were returning to their homes after visiting family in Chicago on the preceding Easter weekend. Others were servicemen, newly discharged from World War II military service. It being early afternoon, many passengers were enjoying lunch in the Advance Flyer dining car, the second to the last car on the train, a car that was completely demolished in the crash.
Of those who lost their lives in the crash, there were seventeen women or girls and twenty-eight men or boys. Two were children. Thirty-nine of the dead were passengers and six were CB&Q employees. Four of the dead were dining car staff. Nearly all of the fatalities occurred in the last two cars of the Advance Flyer.
How could this have happened? CB&Q’s main line was protected with automatic block signals, located every mile, to inform train crews whether or not the track was clear ahead. Like automobile traffic lights, the block signals had aspects of green, meaning okay to proceed, yellow, meaning slow down prepared to stop within the next mile, and red, meaning stop. Railroad operating rules dictated that a train encountering a yellow signal must reduce its speed enough to come to a complete stop before the next signal.
The Advance Flyer and Exposition Flyer were scheduled to operate only two minutes apart, with no scheduled stops for 160 miles. Each day the Exposition Flyer followed the Advance Flyer at eighty miles per hour through the towns along the Q and beyond. Each day the Exposition Flyer engineer would see yellow signals turn green in the distance as his train followed the Advance Flyer.
On April 25, CB&Q engineer, W.W. Blaine, with 40 years’ experience in train operations, piloted the westbound Exposition Flyer, accompanied in the locomotive cab by fireman E.H. Crayton. Before the Advance Flyer made its emergency stop at Naperville, the first signal behind the train automatically turned to red, indicating that a train occupied the track in that block. The second signal behind the train remained yellow. As the Exposition Flyer approached the yellow signal, Blaine reduced the train speed to forty-five miles per hour, likely expecting the previous signal had been about to turn green when he passed it. When he approached the next signal, the one behind the stopped train, the signal was red. He applied the brakes, but too late to avoid crashing into the train ahead. Fireman Crayton leaped from the locomotive cab but was killed instantly when he hit the ground. Crayton was the only fatality from the Exposition Flyer.
Engineer Blaine was charged with manslaughter resulting from his failure to follow operating rules, but was later exonerated. Subsequent investigation did identify railroad operating practices as contributory to the crash. CB&Q consequently adjusted the schedule so that eighty mile per hour trains were not operating two minutes apart. Though the signal system had functioned as intended, an adjustment was made so that an intermediate “flashing yellow” signal aspect was introduced, giving train crews two miles of warning of a possible red signal ahead.
The Exposition Flyer crash is memorialized with a sculpture. In 2014, the “Tragedy to Triumph” memorial sculpture was dedicated at the site. Composed entirely of railroad spikes and wheels, the sculpture depicts three persons: a sailor, symbolizing the 10 miliary personnel on the train, three of whom were on their way to home to announce their engagements to be married, a Kroehler worker, celebrating the heroic efforts of the many Kroehler employees, and an injured woman, in remembrance of the victims of the collision. “Tragedy to Triumph” is so titled to acknowledge both the horrible accident, and the heroic action of so many people who tended to the victims’ needs.
At the time, the Naperville crash was the most-deadly industrial or transportation accident in the towns along the Q. Tragically, the Naperville death toll was exceeded 25 years later, on September 1, 1961, when TWA flight 529 crashed in a farmer’s field in Clarendon Hills following take-off from Midway Airport. That crash claimed the lives of all on board, 73 passengers and 5 crew members. But that is a story for another day.
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