Just a little history, the 1942 train wreck

(The following was reported in the January 15, 1942 issue of The News & Observer and the comments on parentheses were added by the Gazette editor.)

A crack Seaboard passenger train, speeding Southward at more than 50 miles per hour, plowed into a Staudt’s Bakery truck near Wake Forest yesterday morning and instantly killed the driver, Merrill M. Reynolds, of 201 Ashe Avenue. (Near Wake Forest means it happened at the Brick Street crossing in the Royal Cotton Mill village which was a separate town.)

The train, No. 191, “The New York-Florida Limited,” ripped the truck into two parts and strewed wreckage for 2,900 feet before steel parts of the truck, caught under the pilot wheels of the locomotive, capsized it in the middle of Wake Forest. Two cars left the tracks.           A bread box was hurled 100 feet from the crossing at the Royal Cotton Mills and landed on top of a telephone pole. At the scene of the derailment, rails were twisted into “S’s” and a cross tie was thrust through the floor of an express car. It was the sixth grade crossing fatality near Wake Forest in the last 10 years and opened a new year for highway slaughter in Wake County.

C.L. Byrd of Raleigh, engineer, and E.D. Crossin of Norlina, Negro fireman, remained on the engine until it over turned. They escaped injury by closing steam valves and clinging to the upper side of the engine cab.

More than 500 feet of twisted tracks were repaired by 4:45 yesterday afternoon, a little over seven hours after the accident. Passengers on the train, a few of whom received light scratches, were taken back to Henderson and routed southward on a branch line to Apex.

Reynolds was killed by gashes in his head before he was pulled from the burning cab of his truck, which had been knocked about 50 feet down the tracks from the crossing. The train hit the  center of the truck and carried part of the wreckage all the way into Wake Forest. It stopped just a few inches from Hardwicke’s Pharmacy, which in 1928 was rammed in a similar accident. (The engine was on its side within inches of the three-story brick building now occupied by Sweeties candy shop.)

(The following information was added later. Until the Underpass was built in 1937 Wait Avenue crossed the two tracks at the top of the hill and ended at the entrance to the college campus. The entrance was relocated after the Underpass was complete.)

Wake Forest grade crossings have a grim history. In the 1928 accident in which the drug store was smashed, Charlie Lyman of near Wake Forest was killed. In 1931, John Caddell Jr. and Robert Garner, both of Wake Forest, were killed when a train crashed into a school bus. Cecil Warren of Wake Forest was killed in a crash in 1936 and Grofton Carter of Walnut Grove in 1937.

(Added by the editor.) In 1938 Benjamin Thomas Hicks was killed at the Walnut Avenue crossing (now closed) because Hicks, who was deaf, was watching three or four low-flying airplanes and did not hear the train approaching. Hicks had built most of the houses in the mill village, several along North Main Street and was called in to solve the question of how to build the dome in the Wake Forest Baptist Church.

1938 was Benjamin Thomas Hicks killed at Walnut Avenue crossing.

A beloved nursery school teacher (Readers, please help me with the name.) was killed at the East Sycamore crossing, now closed. Young Jamie King was struck and killed while trying to cross the switching area just south of the Underpass when one of his feet was caught. The last fatality occurred in the 1980s when a man was killed trying to cross at East Holding Avenue.