My Books

Buried under the silt of Hawkeye state history lays the story of Iowa's deadliest railroad disaster: the March 21, 1910, derailment of a Rock Island passenger train outside the small town of Green Mountain. This train, detoured due to a freight train crash, left the rails four miles northeast of Green Mountain. Newer steel passenger cars crushed two wooden day coaches after the train's locomotives left the rails, ultimately killing 54 people and injuring nearly 40 others. The catastrophe's aftermath turned life in Marshalltown, the area's largest community, upside down as the sheer number of injured and dead overwhelmed the city's limited medical and mortuary resources. The crash landed on the front pages of newspapers throughout the United States, motivating Iowa's Board of Railroad Commissioners to convene an inquest into the disaster that led to a series of shocking conclusions regarding the incident. Today, only a vague public awareness of the wreck exists. This book lifts the fog of myth about the incident and effectively describes what happened, to whom, and why.