When there is a catastrophe like a trainwreck, the obvious question is what happened, and why? On November 25, 1951, right up the road in Woodstock, Alabama, train “Second 47,” heading south from Birmingham, had a head-on collision with train “48” sitting on the tracks headed north.
In that wreck, the second biggest in Alabama ever, several members of the crew died or were seriously hurt, 15 passengers died and 66 received serious injuries. (Joe Formichella wrote of the biggest wreck in his 2004 novel “The Wreck of the Twilight Limited.”)
In Woodstock, one of the most seriously injured crewmen was the author’s father, Robert, who was serving that day as fireman, a kind of copilot to the driver, the engineer. Neil has interviewed his father extensively, talked with other survivors and obtained the transcripts of the National Traffic Safety Board hearings held in Birmingham. He knows what there is to know and tells the story quite literally minute by minute.
Robert, like many railroad men, carries a two-inch-wide gold watch, a Hamilton, which he, like all railroad men, consults more or less perpetually. He awakens at 4:10 A.M., and we follow him hour by hour, as he washes, gets dressed, arrives at the terminal in Birmingham at 10:31, and goes to work in the cab of “Second 47.”
Along the way, we learn a lot about Robert—his love of literature, his fondness for drinking, although NOT on the job, his gregariousness, his friends and his relationship with his wife, Gerry—not great. We meet other railroad men and learn about signals, whistles, crossings. The warning whistle for a rural crossing is long, long, short, long, I did not know that.
Time, in railroad world, is an obsession. Trains should leave on time, be at particular crossings at precisely the right time, and arrive on time. There are also the laws of physics to consider. Objects, we know, stay in motion unless there is something to stop them, and the most relevant law is that no two objects may occupy the same space at the same time.
Neil follows the northbound train, “48,” hour by hour from New Orleans to Tuscaloosa. As “Second 47” sped into Woodstock, “48” was on THE track, not a sidetrack. The impact was gigantic, nearly unimaginable, and there are photos. The engines hit and rebounded, 60 feet apart. Some passenger cars flew off the tracks in all directions and were telescoped or otherwise demolished. In the end, no one is certain how this happened. Did someone simply misread the signal: human error?
Perhaps intending to speed the prose up, Neil has developed a kind of personal syntax in this book, one in which he has eschewed almost all uses of the article “the,” frequently “a,” and possessive pronouns. I found this an unnecessary tic and a distraction from an otherwise pretty gripping story.
