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Show ' EIGHT MEET DEATH ! WHEN MRS CRASH i i DISREGARD FOR ORDERS SAID TO HAVE CAUSED HEAD-ON COLLISION COL-LISION NEAR PORTLAND. Trains Come Together at High Rate of Speed, Passengers Being Pitifully Piti-fully Crushed, Few Escaping Injury. Portland, Ore. Eight persons were killed outright and seventy others, two of whom were seriously and five critically, injured when two electric trains on the Southern Pacific railroad rail-road collided head-on at Bertha station, sta-tion, ten miles west of here, Sunday. The accident was apparently due to disregard for orders by the crew of the incoming train, according to a statement made by C. W. Martin, assistant as-sistant superintendent of the Southern South-ern Pacific. The train is said to have had orders to pass the outbound train at Bertha station, but instead of stopping there, it passed -on through at a high rate of speed. Just as the train neared a curve beyond the station limits, which swings around a high bank, the out-bound train from Portland came in sight two or three hundred feet away. Despite emergency brak.es appjled on both the trains, they met head-on, with speed practically unchecked. The forward car of the fast-going train bored into and the tnrough the vestibule of the forward car of the out-bound train and plunged on through into a coach filled with men, women and children. They were caught there and pitifully crushed as the trains crashed. Virtually every person in this car not killed outright was injured in some manner. |