The Angola Horror: The 1867 Train Wreck That Shocked the Nation and Transformed American Railroads by Charity Vogel

Abstract

118 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY The Angola Horror: The 1867 Train Wreck That Shocked the Nation and Transformed American Railroads. By Charity Vogel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013, 312 pages, $29.95 Cloth. Review by Larry Grant, The Citadel “In responding to fire it should be remembered that more people generally die from asphyxia due to smoke inhalation than from flames.”1 For those who fear the flames, this peculiar tidbit will seem less comforting after reading Charity Vogel’s dramatic retelling of the December 1867 wreck of the New York Express in The Angola Horror: The 1867 Train Wreck That Shocked the Nation and Transformed American Railroads. Vogel’s ability to invoke fire and other horrors—loss of identity, disaster visited on innocents, painful dismemberment—will unsettle readers who nonetheless will find it almost impossible to put down her vivid narrative. Set in the aftermath of the Civil War as people become accustomed to the return of peace, The Angola Horror follows a chronological narrative over sixteen chapters. In the first three chapters, Vogel introduces many of her characters and discusses the growing popular acceptance of railroading in the 1860s despite the discomfort, dirt, and danger endured by passengers and crews and the general lack of safe equipment and uniform standards. Vogel briefly sketches the geography and history of the region and the rail line and imagines the rather unpleasant, if increasingly routine, nature of train travel in the winter of 1867. The next six chapters, four through nine, are devoted to the individual stages of the tragic journey of the Express from its departure from Cleveland to the crash at Big Sister Creek. The final chapters round out the story by taking various aspects of the aftermath under examination, reviewing, for example, the grisly process used to identify the dead, the rudimentary official inquiry, technical improvements that followed in later years, and the surprising failure to memorialize the victims. Thoroughly furnished with notes and an extensive bibliography, Vogel also includes a prologue, an epilogue, and a lengthy author’s note. Though Vogel’s account of The Angola Horror is meant for general 1. Jay Levinson, Hayim Granot, Transportation Disaster Response Handbook (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2002), 136. Book Reviews 119 readers, a technical current underpins the story of The Angola Horror. Every technological innovation since the creation of the first stone axe has brought both risk and reward, and Vogel captures this side of the Horror well, showing both the unintended consequences that followed the railroads (“contagious illness and disease . . . among other social ills”) and the uneven advance of the technology associated with the immature industry (4). Mid-nineteenth century railroading was a combination of old methods (kerosene lamps, coal stoves, and fragile wooden cars) and imperfect technology (outdated couplers and inadequate brakes) moving at high speeds over poorly maintained track systems (5). As an industry, railroading in 1867 lacked uniform engineering standards and oversight, and there was no authority in place to regulate and enforce standards in any case. Even marking the time of day varied from place to place in the railroading world, meaning schedules and trains might at times collide. Workers, however conscientious, could not overcome the resulting avalanche when these factors collided, and the technological margin available to tolerate and absorb failure might quickly be exceeded. Surprise is hard to achieve when a historian sets out to tell a story with an outcome long established, but The Angola Horror reads like a classic thriller, though the villain here is a synergistic combination of elements. Vogel makes good use of suspense to build tension, mood and character reconstruction to play on reader emotions, and a heightened expectation of terror to come. She invokes all of the reader’s senses, particularly smell and the ability to sense heat and cold, in telling the story. At one point, she has sympathetic readers teetering in midair before plunging into space with the doomed rail car (102–103). Though the frequent use of the conditional tense occasionally distracts the reader with overly complex sentences, Vogel realistically reconstructs the passengers’ likely preoccupations as they rolled toward Big Sister Creek. She takes her information regarding the actions and speech of...