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MAJ-1 DUG · THE INDEPENDENT VIA THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY'S EXHIBIT
The checklist sends this section hunting railroad wrecks at the Walkerton diamonds in the ICC and FRA reports; the town's transport disaster was never a wreck in a docket — it was a car of dynamite caps that blew up in the B. & O. yard in July 1913, and the Independent told it whole. A pile of burning wood, fired by hot cinders from a standing locomotive, reached a yard car holding thirty-two cases of dynamite caps. The explosion splintered the car "into a thousand pieces" and hurled heavy iron hundreds of feet; windows shattered in all parts of town; fires broke out in thirteen different places. At the cut-glass factory the blast broke some 270 windows and a small quantity of finished glass. The Walkerton fire department fought the thirteen fires and the South Bend fire department came down to aid, arriving after most were handled. No death is recorded in the account reached — the disaster's signature is property and glass, a whole town's windows — and no ICC wreck report for it stands in the record reached: a yard explosion from an external fire was the railroad's and the town's event, carried in the press rather than in a federal docket. The item prints the event at the Independent's strength and the docket test as its residue in reverse: the disaster record of the Walkerton crossings is this explosion, and the diamonds' wreck history stands in the FRA-era record as the settler for any later chapter.
Principal sources: Walkerton Independent, July 1913, via Sherland (2012) and the WAHS Central Cut Glass exhibit (read whole); the negative ICC/FRA run of this section for a Walkerton wreck docket.