January 28, 1929 – Two hundred passengers are
shaken up, and forty-two are injured as a Rock Island commuter train crashes through
the bumper at the La Salle Street station, the second serious train accident of
the week. Four days earlier a passenger
died and 39 others were injured when two Chicago and Northwestern passenger
trains collided near Lake Street. In the
Rock Island crash the vice-president of the railroad blames the cause of the
accident on the engineer’s failure to have his train, made up of seven steel
coaches, under control as it entered the station. The engineer, J. Boyd, maintains that fog and
steam inside the train shed clouded his view and that the wheels of the train
slipped on the tracks as he applied the brakes.
Also on this date from an earlier blog entry . . .
January 28, 1901 -- WARNING . . . This one is not for the faint of heart, but it does demonstrate that in the days before O.S.H.A. danger was constantly lurking and peril was always at hand. It happened that Dr. B. L. Reise was administering vaccinations to women at the Young Woman's Christian Association Building on Michigan Avenue. Miss Stella Thomas of Burlington, Iowa, seeing that she would have to wait for some time because of the length of line, headed for her room. There is speculation that the sight of the injections was disquieting to her, and as the elevator approached the fifth floor, Miss Thomas fainted and fell to the floor of the car in such a way that her head extended through the grate of the elevator's door and was caught between the bottom of the elevator car and the lower portion of the fifth floor. Miss Thomas, who had come to Chicago just three weeks earlier to enter the Sherwood Musical College in the Fine Arts Building, died within minutes. The second building from the middle left (next to the mansion on the corner) in the 1901 photo above is the YWCA building where the accident occurred.
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