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Show ENGINEER'S ERROR COSTS MANY LUES Head-on Collision on the Denver & Rio Grande in Which Twenty-one Twenty-one Lives Are Lost. Veteran Engineer Misread His Watch, Encroached Upon Time of Freight Train and Caused One of the Most Horrible Wrecks in History of Road. Gleuwood Springs, Colo. Twenty-one Twenty-one persons were killed and at least 40 injured, many of them seriously, in a head-on collision between westbound west-bound passenger train No. 5 and an eastbound freight train on the Denver & Rio Grande railroad between Dot. sero and Spruce Creek, twenty-two miles from Glenwood Springs, at 9:30 o'clock Friday night. The wreck is said to have been due to a misunderstanding of orders on the part, of Engineer Gustaf Olson, of the passeenger train, a veteran employee em-ployee of the road. Olson, however, claims he understood his instructions perfectly, but that he misread his watch, thus encroaching on the time of the freight train, which was being drawn by- two locomotives, the first of which was in charge of his brother, Sig Olson. According to reports, Engineer Gus-tav Gus-tav Olson, of the passenger train, had orders to wait at Dotsero until 9:55 o'clock for eastbound freight train No. G6, but misread his watch. Parties on the train at the time assert that Con. ductor McCurdy noticed the discrepancy discrep-ancy in the time and gave the engineer the "stop" signal by means of the bell cord connecting with the engineer's cab. In another moment, however, before the train could have possibly been stopped, the crash came, with its consequent appalling results. Engineer Olson is said to be crazed with grief over the sad occurrence. He is one of the oldest men on the road, and has always been regarcieo. as a careful engineer. The impact of the two trains was such that the three big engines were jammed together until they resembled resem-bled one piece of mechanism, while the lightly built combination baggage and express car and the smoker and day coaches telescoped one another, mowing down the passengers in theh seats like a reaper in a grain field. Eight men and women were decapitated decapi-tated as though a cleaver had been used. The heavy Pullmans at the rear of the train crushed what remained of the cars ahead. Only one person in the day coach, Alice Williams, aged four, escaped alive. She was found pinned beneath the wreckage by trainmen, slightly bruised and covered with the life blood from the body of her mother, who was instantly killed, and whose body lay across that of her daughter. The wreckage caught fire and the horrors of a holocaust were only averted by the uninjured passengers and members of the train crews, who used shovels and boards to throw snow upon theh flames, putting them out before they could eat their way through the debris and consume the dead and living. And to make matters mat-ters worse, a second wreck occurred Sunday morning, east of Glenwood Springs, after the first relief train reached that city with the injured, marooning the second relief train carrying car-rying other wreck victims and the bodies of nineteen dead, for nearly ten hours. |