February 16, 1947 Forty to fifty persons were injured, eight of them hospitalized, when a Long Island Rail Road train derailed after hitting an open switch. The steam locomotive wound up in an embankment and five cars of the eleven car train were straddling the tracks about a quarter of a mile west of the Kings Park Station. 300 feet of rails were torn up. None of the cars overturned but the jolt shattered the glass in most of them.
Ambulances from the Kings Park State Hospital, the Veterans Hospital in Northport and Huntington Hospital all sent ambulances, doctors and nurses to the scene, then transported the injured to their facilites. Doctors that lived in the area also came to the scene to assist.
One youth was pinned between two seats and was cut out with an acetylene torch.
The locomotive came to a halt only 20 feet from the 50,000 water tower that is still there today. Five of the injured were critical.
The crash involved an eastbound train from Jamaica to Port Jefferson.
The train left Jamaica at 1054 hours. The crash occurred at 1210 hours. The train was 2 mins behind schedule. It hit the switch at approximately 35 miles an hour. Because of the open switch, the train hit the curved track instead of heading into the station.
The switch is manually operated and was opened approximately an hour prior to allow a special train to discharge passengers on a spur and onto a siding beyond the main line for the State Hospital. That special train backed out and left, but the switch was never closed.
There were an estimated 300 people on the train at the time of the crash. The trains engineer, Walter Sands of Sound Beach was not injured. The subject trapped between the seats was 30 year old James Stein of Steinway Ave in Astoria. All of the injured were from NYC.
A hearing on the crash was held at the State Police substation in Commack. The brakeman in charge of the switch, Charles D. Muller said that he had closed the switch but did not recall if he had locked it. Sgt Howard Heddink of the State Police stated that when he arrived on scene, the switch was open.
Muller, of 179th Street in Jamaica, Queens, had been with the railroad for 11 years.
*There is a folder in the icloud>Documents>Files Smithtown>History Project>History Project Stories> called 1947-2-16 Train Derailment. This folder has the photos, news articles and everything else related to this incident.
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