Trolley Tuesday 10/12/21 - New York City's BRT Malbone Street Wreck

When it comes to any disaster, it is almost always caused by a small mistake way before it even happens instead of a singular freak event that affects an entire industry. Planes, ships, and even trains are not immune from what can crassly be called a "cock-up cascade", and history is sadly littered with the remnants of these events. Hidden among these infamous incidents is what is considered to be the deadliest train crash on the New York City subway system, as well as one of the deadliest train crashes in America. What started as an attempt to circumvent striking workers led to an error of mismanagement, inexperience, and ultimately an unnecessary loss of human life. The Brooklyn Rapid Transit's Malbone Street Wreck is certainly an evening to remember, and one we're looking back at on today's Trolley Tuesday.

The Players

The setting of our ply, on the little "S" curve to Prospect Park.
The full map, circa 1912, can be found here.
(FiftythreeStudios)

A modern view of the Malbone Street Tunnel,
looking south on the Franklin Avenue Shuttle.
(Public Domain)

The venue for this tragedy was located on the Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT) Brighton Line, in the neighborhood of Flatbush in the borough of Brooklyn. True to its name, the area was rather flat as it lay in the center of Brooklyn, with Brighton Beach, Williamsburg, and Bay Ridge all within easy reach of each other.  By November 1, 1918, the Brighton Line was well-known among New Yorkers for being the "subway to the sea", and following its connection to the Broadway Line, one could feasibly ride from Broadway to Brighton Beach in just about an hour. The line under Malbone Street went through a new alignment that took trains going to Coney Island underground and around a new station being constructed, instead of a more-direct line underneath Prospect Park to the Franklin Avenue Line. Due to the limitations on size, the tunnel was built as an S-curved, single-track tunnel, with the trains eventually using the curved tunnel going south to Brighton Beach and the straight tunnel going north under Prospect Park. This section was later double-tracked with the curve being nicknamed "Dead Man's Curve", for reasons we'll get into soon enough.

The three surviving BRT "Gate" cars run an excursion train from Brighton Beach
to King's Highway, courtesy of the New York Transport Museum, June 17, 2017.
(Fan Railer)

The interior of a BRT "Gate" car, with the BRT sigil on the side.
(Orens Transit Page)

The rolling stock found on the BRT's Brighton Beach train were the old Manhattan Elevated "Gate" cars, which were rebuilds of un-motored passenger cars found on the original steam-hauled elevated trains. They were very light, very small, and very weak due to their wooden construction, with the un-motored trailer cars being significantly top-heavy as there were no motors to anchor them down. For the fatal five-car train we're discussing here, trailers 100 and 80 were coupled together near the middle of the train, while motor No. 726 led the train and motors No. 725 and 1046 brought up the rear. Normally, the BRT would not allow a train to be coupled like this, as the motor cars were meant to stabilize the trailers with equal push on both ends. However, this was not the case at this time, as the BRT had other issues to worry about.

A photo from 1918 shows the striking BRT motormen and conductors posing for a photograph. 
(History Channel)

The current logo of the Brotherhood of
Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
(BLE-T)

Right before the accident, the BRT was already facing an intense degradation of public relations when members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE) struck on the morning of November 1, 1918. The BLE's reasons for striking was that 29 motormen (which the organization represented) were fired due to union organization, which was a fairly common thing affecting other transit agencies at the time, especially during World War I. The BRT, already a fairly large mover-and-shaker in city transit, did not deign to meet the strikers demands and instead worked around their manufactured motorman shortage by hiring "scab" motormen from different unions. Because of the speed involved in implementing this new workforce, many men who never had "stick time" with a subway car now found themselves at the controls of their own train. 

BRT's "Timber Trestle" storage yard on Pitkin Avenue between Williams and B Streets.
(Old NYC Photos)

A Brooklyn Union Gate Car train on the
Lexington Avenue "El" at Myrtle Avenue.
(George Conrad, NYCSubway.org)

One of these men was 23-year-old Antonio Edward Luciano, who originally worked under the BRT as a crew dispatcher on the Culver Line to Coney Island, and whose only "stick time" up to this point was hostling non-revenue equipment in 1917. Against all logic, Luciano himself volunteered to operate as a "scab." He had only received three hours of motorman training (the norm was ninety hours of training) and never got himself certified. He had never even been on the Brighton Beach Line at all. To top it all off, the man was recovering from the flu after losing his infant daughter to Spanish Flu, which made the BRT's $20 bonus to volunteer as a motorman (and another raise when the strike ended) that much more enticing. Mourning, sick, and inexperienced, Luciano tried his best to remain positive as he eased his first (and only) elevated passenger service onto the Brighton Beach Line on the evening of November 1. Yes, this all happened in a day.

The Disaster

November 1, 1918, approximately 6:00PM.

A normal New York subway car filled with with women and one conductor, 1920s.
(Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The Franklin Avenue/Fulton Junction station in 1912,
with the BRT Brighton Beach line curving to the right.
(Brooklyn Rapid Transit Els)

It was a Friday evening, and people along the Brighton Beach Line were eager to get home from commuting to downtown Manhattan from Brooklyn. Luciano was operating a "Brighton Beach Inbound" service headed for Prospect Park, and he had already caused his train to leave ten minutes late from Manhattan. It got worse as the miles wore on, with Luciano overshooting platform after platform and having to back-up to line the doors again so the passengers could get off. The mistakes just kept on happening as Luciano not only overshot his stop at Franklin Avenue/Fulton Street, but also drove onto the wrong track for a good city block before realizing his mistake. Normally for a Brighton Line motorman, proper procedure calls for activating two route lights that alert the tower-man to line the train on its correct track. For tower-man Peter Gorman that night, he never saw the lights at all and assumed Luciano's train was the Fulton Street train rather than the Brighton Beach Inbound. Instead of realizing his mistake and backing up his train (blindly), he had to walk the length of the train to "change ends" and back up that way. Understandably, many people fled the train at Franklin Avenue, fearing for their lives, and they were certainly the lucky ones.

A Fulton El train for Franklin Avenue turns back at the junction station.
Note that these gate cars have open "summertime" center sections.
(Brooklyn Rapid Transit Els)

The southern entrance to the Malbone Street tunnel,
with the Prospect Park tunnel at left.
(Unknown author)

After missing another stop at Park Place, where Luciano now overshot the entire train, his mind was fried with trying to make up lost time. As he left, he let the train's speed fly above the normal track speed as he descended into the Malbone Street tunnel at 6:42PM. Many passengers reported him going as high as 70mph, while Luciano reckoned he was going 30; nevertheless, the tunnel's daring S-curve had a maximum speed of 6mph with ample time to brake as it descended into the rathole. Luciano, through his now-demonstrated inexperience with the brake lever, never applied the brakes, and the speed and momentum of the train forced Car No. 726's front truck to hop the tracks and get caught in a partition in the middle of the tracks. The sudden deceleration as 726 smashed its roof into the tunnel wall forced trailer No. 100 to smash into 726, then the momentum forced motor cars 725 and 1046 to telescope trailer No. 80 into No. 100 (where the two cars folded into each other, a common danger with wooden cars). 

Car No. 80 is absolutely destroyed as it was run into by No. 100, rendered into wood splinters and glass shards.
(Public Domain)

Car No. 725 holds Car No. 80 in place just at the entrance to the Malbone Street tunnel.
(Smithsonian Magazine)

Car No. 726 is lodged against the tunnel wall after striking it for some distance.
(NY1)

Inside one of the still-intact motor cars, where shattered
glass injured survivors.
(New York Times)

Crunching wood and steel could be heard all around as passengers were thrown about and crushed, either between the trains or against the tunnel wall. Some were even impaled by shrapnel or mauled when the sides of the wooden cars were sheared off. All the while, Luciano braced himself against the controls and held on tight, supposedly still holding the control stand all the way up. After a few hundred feet more of shambling, twisted movement, the splintered mass of what was once the "Brighton Beach Inbound" came to a stop. Fires from the electric motors soon started and began eating at the wooden car bodies and the loud crashing and smashing that echoed through "Dead Man's Curve" now gave way to hellish wailing and screaming, as if the Gates of Damnation were opened. Survivors who could walk wandered their way out of the tunnel, like dazed zombies under the moonlight, while the rest were left, hoping to God they could save themselves from Hell.

Liberate tutame ex infernis...

The shattered remains of Car No. 100 at 36th-38th Street Yard.
(The New York Times) 

Cleanup and Investigation

Men work to clear the wreckage of Car No. 100 from the tunnel.
(New York Post)

Almost immediately, both police and fire departments across Flatbush were contacted to help with the disaster clean-up; unfortunately, this also caused the switchboards to crash due to the demand for calls. Thankfully, word soon spread around Brooklyn as citizens offered their services to help tend to the wounded survivors, but the large crowd ensnared emergency services from reaching the tunnel effectively. Trains up and down the Brighton Line were immediately halted and all had to find alternative ways home and to downtown Manhattan. All of Brooklyn's nurses and doctors also joined in the fray, which was further hamstrung due to the morgue being full of Spanish Flu victims, leading nearby Ebbets Field to become a makeshift triage station. By the late night, when no more living victims could be pulled out, priests entered to deliver last rites in front of the still-smoldering wreckage. Antonio Edward Luciano simply walked home from the lead car, vaguely recalling he had boarded a Brooklyn Rapid Transit streetcar in a daze, and was eventually arrested on November 2, 1918, at 1AM at his house. 

Mayor John Francis Hylan, looking
very much like reform progressive
President Theodore Roosevelt.
(Forest Hill Times)

Mayor John Francis Hylan was also at the disaster scene that night and said of the disaster in the New York Times:

“Wooden cars…I believe this is the result of employing an inexperienced motorman and the use of all wooden cars. I shall make an investigation tomorrow and see if the B.R.T. cannot be compelled to stop using ‘green’ motormen. [...] I have ordered Police Commissioner Enright to station policemen at every terminal and car-barn from which trains leave, with instructions not to permit any green motormen to take out a train. No man will be permitted to run a train, unless he has had at least three months experience.”

Mayor Hylan also involved himself in the court investigation of the Malbone Street Wreck, using a city charter provision to play "Hanging Judge" as he implicated the BRT and the Public Service Commissioner (for gross negligence under their watch), which led to the Commissioner to attack the Mayor in the local papers for allowing the strike to happen in the first place. Many barbs were traded in newspaper articles after this.

The BMT A/B Standards were introduced in 1923 to replace
the Manhattan Elevated cars. This set is on a trial run on
the new Sea Beach Line.
(NYCsubway.org)

One thing they could agree on, though, was that the BRT’s continued use of elderly wooden cars was a negligent and unsafe practice. After the trains were moved into the 36th-38th yard and sat for a while, the trial against Luciano and the BRT opened in March 1919. Luciano testified on his own behalf, suggesting through shaking words and a choked voice that he was doing everything told of him but the train just did not respond properly. The BRT's own investigation showed the train was operating properly, and no emergency application had ever been attempted. Luciano's instructor, Joseph B. McCann (a veteran motorman of seven years) was questioned about his instruction and, when asked if he gave any "final instruction" or "[certified] Luciano as a competent motorman", only answered "no", for he "had no instructions to do so."

A "through the fence" look at the Malbone Street Tunnel
in 2012, with a crossover track for the Prospect Park tunnel.
(GrayFoxDown)

The trial, from here, got messier and messier, as Superintendent Blewitt (an unfortunate name) of the BRT Southern Division was also charged with negligence for sending the "greenhorn" Luciano out and that the BRT's chief engineer designed the tunnel for slower trains and thus put Luciano under pressure to operate faster. The latter point was later debunked when the chief engineer was able to prove a train could safely navigate the Malbone Street Tunnel at 30 miles per hour. By the end, all parties involved (the BRT and Luciano), were acquitted and had their charges dropped, with Luciano gaining a lot of sympathy as his testimony was delivered through tears and a choked voice. The BRT were able to settle with most of the passengers and their surviving families but sadly, no jury could come to a definitive conclusion that someone had to go to jail. By March 1921, all the defendants had their indictments dropped and the BRT paid out $75 million in crash-related liens and settlements, which put them in a financially dangerous situation.

Lessons Learned

The Brighton Beach station stairs for the NYCTA
B and Q subway services.
(Foursquare)

Another dangerous situation was also averted right after the crash, as by November 2nd, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers agreed to stop the strike. With the weight of both of their actions heavily influencing their talks, the BLE and BRT began conversing about bringing an end to their animosity. The American Federation of Labor commented on the peace talks, 

“Any suspension of work on the part of these employees will make the operation of trains very hazardous and fraught with danger. The riding public of Brooklyn will view this new phase of the strike with anxiety because of the calamitous results in operating trains with inexperienced men.”

These negotiations finally came to an end in 1920, when the BRT and the BLE came to an agreement on a majority of the union's demands. Unfortunately, while the higher-ups were continuing their talks, the BRT was still subject to bomb threats, an averted dynamite explosion at a Fulton Street station, and another major strike where BRT men stoned two trains that killed a seventeen year-old and put the motorman in a coma. Nevertheless, despite the tense labor relations going forward, all parties involved ensured there would be no more incidents like these, because now they, especially the BRT, knew the deadly consequences involved.

A "deadman" pedal on a streetcar.
(Machinery Safety 101)

Further lessons learned included the creation of the "dead man's switch", which was a new invention at the time and only became more popular across street railways in the 1920s. Before this, streetcar and rapid transit controllers had no way to tell if a motorman was being negligent and taking their hands off the controls, nor a way to automatically stop the train should the motorman become incapacitated. While Luciano kept holding onto the controls in a panic, the implementation of dead-man controls (where if a motorman removed their hands from the regulator while moving, the train would apply the emergency brakes automatically) has helped avert more disasters on the New York Subway system when a motorman found themselves concussed with a fracture (1927), a cerebral hemorrhage (1940), and as recent as a fatal heart attack (2010).

What Happened Next?

Empire Boulevard's street sign.
(Father Mark White)

In total, approximately 250 people were injured and 93 to 102 passengers were killed in what is considered to be New York City's deadliest deadliest crash. Even though the trial was inconsequential from a human standpoint, it still succeeded in getting the BRT to retire wooden cars from their services, first by reducing them to limited service (away from rush hour) and then by designing newer, safer steel cars that superseded them. Motors Nos. 726, 725, and 1064 were repaired and returned to service, working until the late 1930s, while the trailers were cut up for scrap. Malbone Street itself was renamed following the disaster to "Empire Boulevard", apart from a detached one-block section in Crown Heights, because the disaster was so traumatic. As for the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Corporation, its hefty payouts to the victims and their families forced them into bankruptcy by 1923, eventually being purchased and managed by the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT). They operate today as the New York City Transit Authority's "B" Division.

On December 1, 1974, a New York City Franklin Avenue "SS" shuttle picked 
the switch just before entering the Malbone Street tunnel heading northbound.
Thankfully, no-one was injured.
(Doug Grotjahn, Joe Testagrose, NYCSubway.org)

Brooklyn borough officials present the new "Malbone Centennial"
street sign on the 101st anniversary of the subway disaster.
(NY1)

Unfortunately, the 1918 Malbone Street Wreck was not the only one to occur in "Dead Man's Curve", as in 1920, another collision happened in the same tunnel when a greenhorn motorman ran into another train, unfortunately killing one person and injuring seventy. Yet another incident happened in 1974, when an R32 subway train split a switch operating at slow speed, derailed, and hit the wall, but thankfully no injuries occurred. Today, the Malbone Street Tunnel is still part of the BMT Franklin Avenue Line and only intermittently used as part of the Franklin Avenue Shuttle. Regular service through the tunnel lasted for only 40 years after the fatal wreck. On November 1, 2019, 101 years after the disaster, Brooklyn officials erected a bronze memorial at the northern exit of Prospect Park, with the corner of Empire Boulevard and Flatbush Avenue now renamed to "Malbone Centennial Way". As for Antonio Edward Luciano, he changed his name to the anglicized "Anthony Lewis" and became a housebuilder in Queens Village, Queens. He later retired to Tucson, Arizona, where in 1985, he died aged 91. 

The new plaque outside Prospect Park Station.
(Bklyner)

Thank you for reading today's Trolley post, and watch your step as you alight on the platform. My resources today included the New York Times' article memorializing the 100th Anniversary of the disaster, a Narratively article retelling the disaster, all of the archived New York Times articles from the period, and the photo credits listed under each caption. I'd also like to thank the podcast "Well There's Your Problem" for introducing me to the Malbone Street Wreck (which takes a more irreverent look at the accident). The trolley gifs in our posts are made by myself and can be found under “Motorman Reymond’s Railroad Gif Carhouse”. On Thursday, we hop over into coal country as we look at the many accidents of the Pittsburgh Railways! For now, you can follow myself or my editor on Twitter, buy a shirt or sticker from our Redbubble stand, or purchase my editor's self-developed board game! It's like Ticket to Ride, but cooler! (and you get to support him through it!) Until next time, ride safe!