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11 November 1969
The documented wreck on this ground is a federal file. On 11 November 1969, at 3:20 p.m., on Penn Central's Chicago Division 2.7 miles west of New Carlisle and 62.8 miles east of Division Post, Chicago, a freight train — Extra 2372 East — ran into the rear of a mail-and-express train standing on track No. 1: one train-service employee killed, two injured. The federal Railroad Accident Investigation Report No. 4154, read first-hand, fixes the place, the hour, the trains, and the cause as the investigators found it: "Failure of the conductor" — the report's own words, printed as it gives them. The report's geography is the town's rail frame in miniature: the crossover at New Carlisle, County Line Road crossing 4,972 feet in the account, JD Interlocking 13.7 miles west, and an earlier derailment of 30 October 1969 between JD and the New Carlisle crossover standing in the same file. No other wreck at this town stands in the federal reports reached, and none is printed from lesser carriers; the crossing toll of the Death Crossing belongs to the highway record in the article above, where its superlative — not a number — is what the record carries. The line's danger in the steam age, the grade fights of the town's own ordinance, and this single documented collision are the wreck record the record keeps, and they print at exactly that size.
Principal sources: U.S. Department of Transportation, Railroad Accident Investigation Report No. 4154, Penn Central Company, New Carlisle, Indiana, November 11, 1969 (read first-hand).