A DIFFERENT TIME, A SIMILAR INCIDENT

Palatka Daily News file photo An Atlantic Coast Line train struck a school bus carrying 27 children in 1933; just south of the spot where Thursday's derailment happened.

History Repeats

Area saw another train tragedy almost 69 years ago

By Marcia Lane Palatka Daily News April 22, 2002

Within a mile or two of Thursday's train wreck is the unmarked site of another train wreck that left this south Putnam County area in despair nearly 70 years ago. On Dec. 14, 1933, 11 area children were killed when their school bus was hit by an Atlantic Coast Line freight train.

In the archives of the Palatka Public Library are copies of the Palatka Daily News from that time. According to the Dec. 15, 1933 Daily News, '”The most horrible accident in the history of this section happened yesterday morning near Crescent City when a school bus was crashed into by a freight train, resulting in the deaths of ten of the school children and the serious injury of a score of others--several of whom are not expected to recover."

Fog was blamed. A heavy fog, noted the Daily News account, "so obscuring the view that no one saw the approaching freight train, and the talk of the children doubtless drowned out the blowing of the whistle of the train for the crossing. The train was within ten feet of the bus before it’s on-coming was noted; then it was too late. The impact demolished the bus, and a frightful scene followed. Four bodies lay on the cow catcher ... "

The children were in their bus with many of the canvas curtains lowered. It was speculated that few of the 27 children on board saw the train before the crash. The bus was a standard, mid 1920s' truck chassis with a homebuilt wooden body. Children sat on benches running the length of the bus.

Scattered for more than 100 yards at the wreck site were schoolbooks, lunches, hats and clothing.

A Crescent City policeman said there was so much "confusion and screaming I can barely recall any details of the hurried rescue work. Grief stricken mothers sought wildly to learn if their children were in the long list of dead or injured. Everybody was too horrified and confused to think of anything except to removed the mangled dead and to get the injured to medical attention."

The tragedy put the area into the national spotlight. Special press correspondents wired and phoned from “New York, Chicago and other distant places seeking full reports and wanting pictures of the wreck."

"Several children escaped the tragedy because they were kept from school to help with fern cutting, a local industry," noted the paper.

Bus driver D.R. Niles was driving the bus and "had reached the end of his route at Silver Pond Grove, south of Crescent City, and started on the road to school.

“The crossing was on a dirt side road, not far from the paved highway ... " when the accident occurred.

The wreck was quickly investigated and within an hour, the train was on its way to Jacksonville. Four hours later, the engineer was driving another train back down the same route, according to a retrospective story on the tragedy written in 1994 in the Putnam County Courier-Journal. Then editor Al Krombach spent months researching the article and talking to people who remembered the incident.

The bus driver, who had been called one of the safest on the route, was eventually found negligent by the coroner's jury. A grand jury said he shouldn't have had to cross the railroad tracks at Silver Pond.

Neither the governor's office nor local authorities took any action.

The headline on Krombach's news story probably said it all: “The year without Christmas."