Most Popular PlacesRandom PlaceListsItinerariesAdd a PlaceDownload the App Site of the Malbone Street Wreck 23rd Street Mural Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum Airpower Museum Is Alton, Illinois America’s Most Haunted Small Town? 4 days ago 14 Real Places That Haunt the Pages of Literature 6 days ago All the United States New York State Brooklyn Site of the Malbone Street Wreck An out-of-service tunnel and nearby remembrances recall the location of a deadly train crash in the New York City subway. Prospect Park subway station entrance.
Anna Minster / Atlas Obscura User Prospect Park subway station entrance. Anna Minster / Atlas Obscura User The Malbone Street wreck was the worst catastrophe in the history of the New York City subway system and the worst train crash in New York State. Almost 100 people died—an exact number was never determined—and around 250 riders injured, roughly half of the passengers.
Many factors contributed to the Malbone Street wreck; mechanical deficiencies, circumstantial events, human error. Despite the number of dead and the horrific way in which they died, the disaster was not formally memorialized until a century later. (In fact, the city’s Board of Alderman changed the name of Malbone Street to Empire Boulevard scarcely one month after the accident, eliminating even a verbal, nominal, geographic reminder.) In addition to the centennial memorials, it is possible to spot the location of the 1918 crash from the Franklin Avenue Shuttle and the street. Intracity rail service at the turn of the last century was so different from now that it is difficult to imagine it.
Today, the quasi-public Metropolitan Transportation Authority operates steel-body trains on track engineered with numerous safety systems. On Friday, November 1, 1918, the privately-owned Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT) ran 30-year-old wooden cars, in this instance between Park Row, near City Hall, and Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. The train that left Lower Manhattan at 6:14 p.m. did not have headlights or a speedometer.
The track was without timed signals or “trippers,” an automatic braking system. Brighton Beach-bound passengers today ride beneath Prospect Park on track that connects the DeKalb Av and Prospect Park stations but in the early-19th-century, trains ran over the Brooklyn Bridge to elevated track above Fulton Street, before heading south on the right-of-way now used by the Franklin Avenue shuttle. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, a union representing some of the motormen operating elevated trains for the BRT, went on strike on the morning of the accident.
The rail company decided to keep service running by reassigning non-striking personnel. In the case of the train that derailed, Antonio Edward Luciano, a crew dispatcher with less than three hours of classroom training and only limited experience moving non-passenger trains in a rail yard, was made a substitute motorman. Luciano was more than inexperienced.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
