[milwaukee-electric] Re: Milwaukee slums during the 1940s and afterward

[Scott Greig]

Maeder jumped (or was pushed when he froze in the doorway), then was followed by the assigned motorman and George Gloff, who was the last one to make it out before impact.  That's documented, both in court testimony from the wreck and an oral history of Gloff made years later.

The Soldier's Home wreck of 1949 was an entirely different series of events, and there were a couple of other notable collisions on Speedrail.  All of them had more to do with human error than mechanical failure.

--- On Tue, 11/9/10, Gary Schnabl <gSchnabl at SWDetroit.com> wrote:

> From: Gary Schnabl <gSchnabl at SWDetroit.com>
> Subject: [milwaukee-electric] Re: Milwaukee slums during the 1940s and afterward
> To: milwaukee-electric at lists.dementia.org
> Date: Tuesday, November 9, 2010, 10:47 AM
> On 11/9/2010 9:31 AM, Scott Greig
> wrote:
> > In this case, the owner WAS the motorman.  Maeder
> was a longtime trolley fan who enjoyed periodically
> operating trains on "HIS" railroad.  However, I don't
> believe that he had ever gone through a proper training and
> instruction program like TMER&L (and TMER&T) had
> used.
> >
> > After years of studying the events of the day, my
> conclusion is that, at some point after speaking with
> Tennyson at Brookdale Siding (where he was trying to sort
> out the seriously-delayed NMRA specials) Maeder got an idea
> in his head that if he could catch all the signals just
> right, and get up to West Junction before LeRoy Equitz came
> south with the next charter train, he could make up his lost
> time coming back downtown.
> >
> > To me it was very telling that Maeder violated his own
> operating rules (as well as the orders he had imposed on the
> charter trains that morning) by telling John Heberling to
> let him through at Oklahoma Avenue.  I suspect that his
> mind was focused on getting ahead to the Junction, and that
> he either never looked at the signal, or looked at it and
> "saw" what he was hoping to see.
> >
> > Scott.
> So, the account that Mader was thrown free from the car by
> some 
> engineer/motorman (who unfortunately died...) was probably
> fictitious? 
> What did the surviving passengers say about that?
> 
> It appears that two Labor Day holiday weekends were dark
> days for 
> Speedrail. What was the accident of 1949 all about? Were
> there other 
> less spectacular mishaps on Speedrail (near misses, etc.)?
> -- 
> 
> Gary Schnabl
> Southwest Detroit, two miles NORTH! of Canada--Windsor,
> that is...
> 
> 
> 
> 
>