The fireball rolled over the blocks around the tracks at seven minutes to three in the afternoon, and when it passed, sixteen people were dead, among them the town’s fire chief and its police chief, Guy Barnett. Forty-three more were hurt. Buddy Frazier, then a young Waverly policeman and later the town’s mayor, said the chief had sent him on an errand just before the blast. That errand saved his life.

Waverly, Tennessee, had been waiting for this for two days. On the night of February 22nd, 1978, a Louisville and Nashville freight train moved slowly through downtown when twenty-three of its cars came off the track. Two of them were tank cars full of liquefied petroleum gas, the fuel most people call propane. Neither one was leaking.

Firemen walked into the wreck that night to check for gas with no detectors, only their noses, and the town settled into wait. By the next afternoon, the railroad had dragged both tanks beside the track so the gas could be pumped into trucks, and that evening, the main line was open again. Friday, February 24th, turned sunny and mild, and by midday, it was in the fifties. At about 7 minutes to 3, gas was seen coming from one of the cars, and seconds later, the cloud caught fire and the tank burst.

The National Transportation Safety Board traced the disaster back to a wheel. A gondola of crossties had been added to the train with its handbrake still set, and one of its wheels overheated and broke miles before Waverly, and that threw the cars off. In the wreck, the tank was dented and gouged, and a crack started in its steel. The crack most likely grew when the car was moved, or as the pressure rose, the board said.

City fire officials had assumed the tank had a second wall, and it did not. Afterward, the board asked the Railroads Association to give crews guidelines for judging a damaged tank before moving it. Two state markers for the disaster stand on East Railroad Street. Why does a tank of gas wait before it blows?

Inside, propane stays liquid only because it is squeezed. Fire on the tank makes that liquid boil, and the pressure climbs until a relief valve opens and lets gas out to burn. The liquid keeps the steel it touches cool. Above the liquid, there is only gas, and there the steel heats, softens, and finally tears.

That can take minutes or hours, and it is why firemen died walking up to a burning car that looked steady. Robert Burke, a fire service writer who studied the case, says later tank cars got a jacket of insulation that buys roughly an hour more before the steel fails. At Kingman, Arizona, that is exactly how it happened. On the afternoon of July 5th, 1973, at the Doxol gas plant on the east side of town, beside Route 66, two men began unloading propane from a railroad tank car on a Santa Fe siding.

A fitting leaked. One of them went to tighten it with a wrench made of aluminum alloy, not the brass kind meant to make no sparks, and the leak caught fire at the top of the tank. Both men were burned. The fire department got the call just before two, and was there within minutes.

Firemen began to cool the burning car with water, and set up a big deluge gun. Nineteen minutes after the flames first reached the top of the car, the tank burst. A ball of fire rolled over the firemen and over the crowd that had gathered to watch. Eleven firemen died, along with the plant manager, and more than ninety people were burned, most of them onlookers.

Kingman built Firefighters Memorial Park with a covered pavilion and granite markers carrying the names of the eleven firemen and the plant manager. If you visit that park today, you can read every name. Route 66 still runs past the side of town where the plant and its siding stood. Not every disaster on this scale needs fire.

In the early hours of January 6th, 2005, a Norfolk Southern freight train was running north through Graniteville, South Carolina, at about 47 miles an hour. Earlier, another crew had parked a short local train on a side track that served the Avondale Mills textile plant. When that crew finished its work, it left the main line switch lying toward the side track. Nothing in the system reminded the crew to put it back.

Before three that morning, the freight took the switch, swung onto the side track, and slammed into the parked train. Both of its locomotives and sixteen of its cars came off the rails. Among them were three tank cars of chlorine, and one was punctured. Chlorine is heavier than air, and Graniteville sits in a shallow valley along Horse Creek.

The engineer and eight other people died. Six of them were mill workers, and hundreds more went to hospitals. About 5,400 people within a mile were moved out of their homes for days. The NTSB found that the local crew had failed to put the switch back, and that nothing would have reminded them to do it.

It added that the puncture of one chlorine car made the wreck so deadly, and it named the weakness of tank cars carrying such loads as a safety issue. Within days, federal regulators reminded every railroad that main line switches must be set for through trains. Avondale Mills closed the next year. In May 2006, Graniteville unveiled a monument to the dead, and the firefighters who answered that night raised the money for it.

At the unveiling, a relative of one of the mill workers said her family could come to it whenever they wanted and touch it. If you visit Graniteville today, you can do the same, and the main line where the switch stood open still runs through the middle of town. In Decatur, Illinois, the spark never was identified. Before dawn on Friday, July 19th, 1974, a Norfolk and Western crew was sorting cars in the railroad’s yard the way many yards did then, by cutting cars loose and letting them roll down the tracks into the cars ahead.

One cut was five tank cars loaded with isobutane, a fuel gas close to propane. It was let go at a higher speed than the yard allowed, about three times a normal coupling speed by one account. The last tank car slammed into an empty boxcar. The boxcar’s coupler rode up over the tank car’s coupler and punched a hole in the tank.

Isobutane poured out and turned to vapor, and for several minutes, a heavy cloud spread low across the yard. Just after five, it found a spark that nobody ever identified, and it exploded. Seven railroad men died of their burns, and the NTSB counted more than 340 people hurt, most of them outside the yard. A resident told the local paper it looked like a bomb going off.

By a later count in the Decatur paper, nearly 80 houses were destroyed and hundreds more buildings were damaged across about a square mile, and the shock was felt 40 miles away. The NTSB blamed the overspeed impact between the heavy tank cars and the light boxcar. It was the second of three nearly identical railyard explosions in the country that year, and the worst. Afterward, the rules changed.

Loaded tank cars of dangerous gas could no longer be cut loose while moving, and crews had to be present when such cars were coupled. The Norfolk and Western is part of Norfolk Southern now. I found no marker for the seven men. If you drive through Decatur near the yard today, you are in the neighborhoods that police evacuated that morning, where National Guard troops patrolled the damaged streets for weeks that summer.

Some wrecks have no explanation at all. In thick fog before dawn on Sunday, February 26th, 1978, a southbound freight of the Atlanta and St. Andrew’s Bay Railway, the line people there call the Bay Line, was running from Dothan, Alabama, toward Panama City. About a mile north of Youngstown, Florida, where US 231 runs beside the tracks, the train came off the rails.

The corner of one car punched into a tank car of liquid chlorine. The gas came out into the fog. A retired chief engineer of the Bay Line later said, “The bottom part of that fog was greenish-yellow. It drifted across the highway.

” The gas stalled the engines of passing cars and the people inside were caught in it. Some tried to run. Eight people died, most of them in their teens and early twenties, and the NTSB counted 138 hurt. All of them had breathed the chlorine.

A sheriff’s deputy, Tommy Lofton, went into the cloud and got six children out, and he said later that three of them died. The train’s engineer survived for hours in a low spot off the tracks where the air stayed clean until a helicopter reached him. The NTSB then found that this wreck was no accident. Someone had deliberately moved the end of a rail into the path of the wheels, and it stayed there until the train arrived.

Nobody was ever charged. Forty years later, that same retired Bay Line man still believed somebody simply wanted to see a train wreck. The board never said who it was. I found no marker for the eight who died.

If you drive US 231 north of Youngstown today, you are on the same road where those cars stalled in the fog about a mile above town. Not all railroad disasters were accidents. In the summer of 1916, the Lehigh Valley Railroad’s terminal on Black Tom, a strip of land in New York Harbor at Jersey City, was crowded with ammunition for Britain and France. The United States was not yet in the war.

The explosives sat in warehouses, in railroad boxcars on the sidings, and on barges at the piers. Shortly before two in the morning on Sunday, July 30th, the first explosion came. At five minutes past two came the biggest. People were thrown from their beds and windows broke for miles.

Shrapnel struck the Statue of Liberty across the water, and the shock damaged the arm that holds the torch. On Ellis Island, the roof of the main building fell in. Early reports said fifty were dead. The count later fell to about seven.

Among them were a Jersey City patrolman and the chief of the Lehigh Valley Railroad police, and nobody is sure of the real number. At first the guards were blamed because some had lit smudge pots to keep off mosquitoes. In time, investigators came to believe it was sabotage by German agents trying to keep the ammunition from reaching the allies. The Lehigh Valley Railroad pressed its claim against Germany for years, and in 1939 a claims commission ruled that Germany was responsible.

The money came slowly. The last payment was made in 1979, more than sixty years after the night of the blast. Black Tom itself was joined to the shore by landfill and is now part of Liberty State Park. A plaque at the park’s flag plaza marks the explosion.

The statue’s torch has been closed to visitors ever since 1916. If you stand at Flag Plaza today, you look across the harbor at the same statue that took the shrapnel that night from what is left of the railroad’s island. Cold can kill as surely as heat. At about half past six on the morning of February 18th, 1969, a Chicago, Burlington and Quincy freight came into Crete, Nebraska, at about 52 miles an hour.

It was four degrees above zero, calm and foggy, with deep snow on the ground. At a switch on the curve into town, cars toward the back of the train left the rails and slammed into cars standing on side tracks, among them tank cars of anhydrous ammonia, the farm fertilizer. One of those tank cars was struck so hard that it shattered. Its whole load, about 29,000 gallons, burst out and turned to gas.

And with no wind and the cold air trapped near the ground, the cloud lay over the blocks around the tracks for a long time. Three transients riding the freight died in the wreck. Six people from nearby houses died in the gas, most of them after they ran outside into it. Among them, a father and his little daughter.

But here is the answer to the riddle of the couple who outlasted a poison cloud with a cellar, a bucket of water, and some rags. A couple near 13th Street heard the wreck, smelled ammonia, and saw only fog outside. They went down into their cellar with a bucket of water and some cloths, and they kept the wet cloths over their faces for about an hour until rescuers came. They were not hurt.

The NTSB found that people who stayed inside with the windows and doors shut tight mostly came through. The board blamed the derailment on the switch rail, which moved under the sideways push of the locomotive over track that was out of line and rough. It said the tank broke apart because its steel had turned brittle in the cold. By one account, Crete’s volunteer fire department kept the old open-cab pumper from 1946 that answered that morning.

If you stand on Highway 33 by the tracks in Crete today, you are near the front yard where the top of that tank came down. On the morning of Monday, March 18th, 1912, Southern Pacific engine 704 stood in the railroad’s roundhouse on North Hackberry Street at the east edge of downtown San Antonio. It was a big ten-wheel steam engine, back after months of repairs from a wreck in Christmas week, and it was being fired up for its test run. All around it, the roundhouse was full of men at work.

At five minutes to nine, the boiler exploded. The blast tore through the roundhouse, and oil from a ruptured fuel car caught fire and burned some of the men. Many people in town thought it was an earthquake. Twenty-six bodies were identified, and other counts run as high as forty, because some of the dead were never named.

About fifty were hurt. The senior engineer, Walter Jordan, was among the dead. A steam boiler is a sealed drum of very hot water held shut by its steel and kept safe by a valve that lets steam out before the pressure gets too high. The federal report released that May found that a worker had tightened the adjusting screw on that safety valve, so the steam kept building past what the boiler could hold.

An earlier committee had blamed cold water let into a boiler that was low on water. The accounts still do not agree. Talk of union saboteurs was ruled out early. Soldiers came from Fort Sam Houston to help, with doctors and horse-drawn ambulances.

Historians call it one of the worst locomotive boiler explosions in American history, and for most of a century, it was nearly forgotten. I found no marker for the men who died there. If you drive North Hackberry Street today, you pass the east side of downtown where they worked, and nothing I could find there names them. Heat, not cold, undid Meldrum, Georgia.

Sunday, June 28th, 1959, was the hottest day Meldrum had seen in almost two weeks, 98 degrees by three in the afternoon. On the east bank of the Ogeechee River, about a mile and a half west of the Meldrum station, people had come to a picnic ground and swimming spot right beside a long railroad trestle. By mid-afternoon, there were people on the bank and in the water, whole families among them. A little later, a Seaboard Airline freight with more than 120 cars came onto the trestle at close to its speed limit.

Near the east end, a pair of wheels dropped inside the rail and sixteen cars derailed. Several fell off the trestle onto the riverbank and into the river, and two of them were tank cars of liquefied petroleum gas. The coupler of one punched into the end of the other, and gas poured out over the picnic ground. The cloud spread hundreds of feet in every direction and caught fire from a source nobody found.

A flash fire swept the bank. The conductor and the flagman shouted warnings from the caboose, and the flagman jumped into the river. Twenty-three people who were swimming or picnicking died. In the fire that followed, the second tank heated until its safety valve opened, and the gas escaping from it burned, too.

It was the same slow danger as at Kingman. The Interstate Commerce Commission found that the heat had made the rails on the trestle expand until they bowed outward under the train, and that guardrails on the bridge would probably have kept the cars from falling. It told the railroad to review its policy against them. In 1961, the community opened Meldrum Memorial Park with a plaque that lists all twenty-three names.

If you visit that park today, you can read every one of them. Ardmore, Oklahoma, is the worst of them all. In September 1915, a railroad tank car of casinghead gasoline, a light fuel taken from natural gas, stood in the Santa Fe yard near the Ardmore Depot, waiting to go to a local refinery. The weather was hot, by one local history, 93 degrees.

The sun warmed the car until its pop-off valve opened, and gas began to leak into the low streets of downtown. On Monday, September 27th, a man sent by the refinery took the dome off the top of the car, and more vapor came out. Then something set it off. Accounts differ on the spark, and one account says dynamite stored nearby went off as well.

The explosion flattened much of the business district, wrecked the depot, and broke windows half a mile away. The usual count is 43 dead, and one local history gives 49. Ardmore called for help by telegraph. At Gainesville, Texas, the Santa Fe made up a relief train, and engine 1108 ran it north with aid workers aboard, by one local account, at up to 90 miles an hour.

Afterward, Oklahoma put new rules on shipping casinghead gasoline. On a railroad, the steepest mile decides what the whole line is worth. At Ardmore, that mile was a few feet of track beside the depot, where one hot car stood waiting. Ardmore built a new brick depot with white stucco walls and a red tile roof, and it opened in August 1917.

The city owns it now, and Amtrak’s Heartland Flyer stops there. Engine 1108, the engine of the mercy train, is on display in Depot Park, just west of the station. If you stand on that platform today, you are close to where the tank car stood, and the engine that came to help is a short walk away. Ten places.

A cracked tank warming in the sun, a spark from the wrong wrench, a switch left the wrong way, tank cars let go too fast, a rail moved on purpose, saboteurs on a pier, brittle steel in the cold, a safety valve screwed down, rails swollen by heat, and a dome lifted off on a hot day. In February 2023, at East Palestine, Ohio, five derailed tank cars of vinyl chloride were vented and burned on purpose, but nobody died there, so it is not on this list. Neither is the Navy’s Port Chicago Pier in California, where 320 men died in a munitions explosion in July 1944, because that was a navy loading disaster rather than a railroad one.