Two sleek first-class streamliner trains with 206 ticketed passengers between them pulled out of Ogden, Utah, on Monday, Nov. 12, 1951, on their way to Chicago.
One train was carrying several doctors who had been at a convention of the American College of Surgeons in southern California. The other had a scion of America’s greatest railroad and shipping empire, the Vanderbilts.
Train 104, named the City of Los Angeles, a 12-car train with three engine units started down the Union Pacific eastbound main line on time at 9:45 a.m. Then 13-car Train 102, named the City of San Francisco, pulled out at 10:07 a.m.
It was 12 minutes late, and both were headed into a significant snowstorm.
At the controls of the lead locomotives were Evanston, Wyoming,engineers. D. Kellher had the throttle on the City of Los Angeles and Chief Engineer Rees Paul, 62, was at the controls of the City of San Francisco.
Before lunchtime, both trains would be derailed, 17 people would be dead and 159 others injured.
Evanston was suddenly making headlines across the nation.
“20 Killed as 2 Eastbound Streamliners Smash Up Near Utah-Wyoming Border,” the Salt Lake Tribune incorrectly reported on Nov. 13, 1951. “Rescue crews search for more victims.”
At a time when railroad technology and safety protocols had been much improved from decades before, railroading was still a potentially dangerous profession in the early 1950s. Without computers and advanced scheduling and switching technology, trains running into themselves was always a risk.
Even a delay as short as less than 10 minutes could be disastrous if others on the same rail lines don’t know about it.
Post-crash investigators also determined that if an alert system already available and in use in some train engines at the time had been installed in these engines, the crash would likely have been avoided.
Issues With Signals
In the lead train, Kellher passed Wahsatch, Utah, 65 miles east of Ogden, Utah, eight minutes late.
The train had run into a significant snowstorm with heavy wet snow and winds.
Barely 5 miles ahead at Wyuta, Utah, was an 89-car freight train pulling into a middle-track siding to let the streamliners pass. Both Kellher and the freight engineer told investigators that they were struggling to discern signal lights because of snow sticking to the lights. The green light was especially hard to make out.
When a light is unable to be read, Union Pacific rules required trains to regard it as a red.
The portion of the track between Ogden, Utah, and Green River, Wyoming, in 1951did not yet have technology installed that would allow in-cab signaling that existed at a few other stretches of track across to Omaha.
Train expert and accredited accident reconstructionist Robert Halstead of Syracuse, New York, said the in-cab technology in 1951 involved a small display inside the locomotive designed to work in conjunction with the wayside signals.
“If you have cab signals, you still need wayside signals at certain locations,” he told Cowboy State Daily.
Halstead said the safety technology in place in 1951 has now evolved from in-cab signals to “positive train control” which can stop a train automatically.
Halstead said snow on eastbound tracks remains an issue still with the wayside signals that still exist and are needed at train intersections.
“We’ve had many a time that a signal maintainer has been called out to clear the signal,” he said.
The Difference Now
Union Pacific spokesman Mike Jaixan agreed that the computerized positive train control system in place now would prevent a similar tragedy today.
“Today, a computer screen in the cab provides the locomotive engineer with much more information than the old signal systems were able to, and the entire system also monitors the locations of other trains to help keep our train crews and communities safe,” he said.
But for City of Los Angeles engineer Kellher on Nov. 21,1951, he was rolling blind.
An Interstate Commerce Commission investigation released Feb. 11, 1952, found that when the City of Los Angeles approached Wyuta — a station at the border between Wyoming and Utah — Kellher could read two signals five miles behind and five miles out respectively, but a signal two miles from what became the crash site was indiscernible.
Kellher stopped his train, still unable to tell what the signal was, then proceeded cautiously until the cab crew saw the freight on the siding and at the next signal they stopped, and the following one as well.
The Union Pacific’s City of Los Angeles heads down the tracks in its heyday. Passengers on the train on Nov. 13, 1951, included several doctors who had been at a convention. (Courtesy American Rails) 
The Uinta County Herald had extensive coverage of the train wreck just west of its city. (Courtesy Wyomingnewspapers.com) 
The Salt Lake Tribune on Nov. 13, 1951, had several headlines related to the train wreck. (Courtesy Newspapers.com) 
Rees Paul, the engineer at the controls on the City of San Francisco, was well respected in Evanston and at the railroad. His mistakes at bypassing signals blocked by snow claimed his own life and took the lives of 16 others. (Courtesy Find A Grave) 
John Henry Branstiter was the only surviving member of the City of San Francisco’s 1951 train wreck with the City of Los Angeles. He died in 1980 and is buried in Bellingham, Washington. (Courtesy Find A Grave)
Crash
The conductor and front brakeman were in the vestibule between the third and fourth cars of the City of Los Angeles when the crash happened.
They were unable to see either the front or back end of their train as it stopped at signals coming in Wyuta because of the blowing snow limiting visibility.
Following railroad rules, a flagman from the freight train reported that brakeman/flagman H.B. Preese on the City of Los Angeles had red markers and an oscillating red light on the rear observation car because it had stopped and was moving slowly and that the train’s flagman was standing in the rear vestibule of the 11th car were lighted.
“A short time later, he watched Train 102 pass (the signal) without stopping,” an investigator’s report stated.
On board the City of San Francisco, fireman John Branstiter, 36, would later testify that his wiper on the left side of the engine was not working properly, and he had told Paul and electrician Norman Evans of Omaha, who was in the cab with them, that he couldn’t make out the signals.
As the train made the 1-degree curve into Wyuta, he saw a flashing red light out his side window. The brakeman for the freight train in the siding track in the middle of the eastbound and westbound tracks had put out appropriate flares.
‘Oh God, What’s Happened’
“I heard Paul say, ‘Oh God, what’s happened?’” Branstiter later would later tell authorities. “Just then we hit. Glass began to fly, and I threw my arms over my eyes and ducked below the dashboard. The engine seemed to climb and turn. It stopped suddenly and came down with a bang.”
The train was going 77 mph. The City of Los Angeles was at 2 mph.
Stanford University journalism professor Clifford Weigle was in the washroom of his car toward the rear of Paul’s train.
He told The Associated Press in a story published in the Winona Republican-Herald in Winona, Minnesota, that when the three engines of the City of San Francisco tore into the observation car and then others on the train ahead, it threw passengers and luggage all over the floor of his car.
“The car was off the tracks. I looked out of our coach and forward to where our locomotive hit the observation care of the City of Los Angeles,” he said. “It was a complete shambles. Our locomotive was literally buried under the wreckage of the City of Los Angeles observation car.”
He said it was snowing at the time and there was about a foot of snow on the ground.
“All up and down the line, cars were derailed,” Weigle said.
Not only had the City of San Francisco demolished the observation car of the City of Los Angeles, it had completely derailed the entire train.
The 11th and 10th cars of City of Los Angeles just ahead of the observation car were shredded metal, the ninth car was tossed on its side and significantly damaged as was the eighth car. Other cars were damaged but not as significantly and managed to stay upright.
The City of San Francisco’s lead engine ended up on its right side on top of the 10th car of the City of Los Angeles. None of the train’s cars overturned, but all were derailed and all had degrees of damage.
Inside the lead engine, Paul and Evans were dead and Branstiter seriously hurt. It took rescue crews 2 1/2 hours to get him out.
Disaster Response
When the city of Evanston received notification of the wreck, disaster response kicked into gear.
The Salt Lake Tribune reported the newly organized Uinta County Civil Defense Committee put out a call to all available doctors in the region and police and firefighters responded to the scene. A makeshift morgue was set up above city hall.
Responders from Utah also headed for the scene, as well as a Union Pacific disaster response team.
Busses headed eastbound on I-80 stopped in Evanston to let off passengers and headed back to the crash scene to bring in uninjured passengers. People in vehicles also helped transport people into town from the wreck.
At the crash site, a mix of people on the train were pondering what just happened, some hurt and others just shaken up. A mail clerk from Cheyenne, Wyoming, three cars behind the City of San Francisco’s engines told reporters that, “Everything was running as usual when there suddenly was a terrific roar and a sound like someone screaming.”
“I guess that was the steel being torn apart,” passenger Alex Henetz said. When he went outside his car, he helped a woman from the top of the wreckage. “How she was thrown out, I will never know.”
Riding in the observation car was a distinguished cancer surgeon and graduate of Harvard medical school, Dr. Robert Thomson of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, a city 50 miles northwest of Boston. He was sitting there with Fitchburg surgeon Dr. Rudolf F. Bachmann, the medical examiner for the Fitchburg district; and Dr. John Hugh Marshall of Findlay, Ohio.
All were instantly killed, as was Dr. Anthony S. Ippolito of Chicago.
Ippolito and Bachmann’s wives also died in the crash, and Thomson’s wife Jane was critically injured.
Bachmann’s body was recovered between the last locomotive unit of the City of San Francisco and the baggage car, Marshall’s underneath the lead locomotive. Thomson’s body was not found until Nov. 19, a week later, in the mass of shredded wreckage.
A Vanderbilt Emerges
Unhurt in a car at the back of the City of San Francisco was George Washington Vanderbilt III, a yachtsman and explorer along with his second wife, whom he had married the year before.
He was the great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt and his father, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, had died in the famous sinking of the RMS Lusitania. He had inherited an estimated $40 million.
The Evanston newspaper reported that the Vanderbilt, 37, and the former Anita C. Zabala Howard, exited the train, his wife holding a poodle dog. Neither they nor the dog were injured.
“They left Evanston at 6:45 p.m. Monday in a car driven by Jack C. Best, Green River, Wyoming, Union Pacific agent who took them to Green River to catch a train,” the newspaper reported. “Each had about 25 pieces of matched luggage, also unharmed.”
The investigation into the crash found the signals that the City of Los Angeles crew could not read were packed with 3-4 inches of snow and that Paul, the well-respected engineer at the helm of the City of San Francisco, failed to “operate the train in accordance with signal indications.”
The Interstate Commerce Commission recommended the Union Pacific extend its automatic cab-signal system that was then operating between Green River and Laramie, as well as between Cheyenne and Columbus, Nebraska, to the entire line between Ogden, Utah, and Omaha.
“If a cab-signal system had been in service it is probable that this accident would have been averted,” its report stated.
Lawsuit Win And A Sailor
Branstiter, the only survivor from the City of San Francisco cab, took months to recover from his injuries.
He sued the railroad for its failure to maintain the locomotive windshield wiper for $40,000. A jury awarded him $17,500. He later moved to Washington state and became a TV repairman, dying Feb. 13, 1980.
In addition to the two deaths in City of San Francisco cab and the brakeman/flagman for the City of Los Angeles, train crew killed included two porters and a club car attendant on the City of Los Angeles. The rest were passengers.
Vanderbilt, who made headlines in Newsday and the New York Daily Herald for being in the crash, would go to divorce his wife in 1958 and marry two more times. He ended his life by leaping from a 10th floor suite of a San Francisco hotel June 24, 1961.
One of the passengers that emerged unhurt from the wrecked trains was H.D. Bernard of Carson City, Nevada. He told a reporter covering the story for the Salt Lake Tribune that he was a sailor on 30-day leave from his job as an aircraft metal worker.
The reporter for the story published Nov. 13 did not note his assignment station or which train he was on.
Bernard said during his leave he had already weathered two car crashes and that a horse sat on him when he tried to ride it.
“I guess the only safe place for a sailor is in the Navy,” he said.
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
