A century ago, a commuter train carrying hundreds of passengers from Park Row to Brighton Beach, New York, took a perilous stretch of rail at seven times the appropriate speed.
At the controls was Edward Luciano, a young and inexperienced driver with only two hours of training, brought in as a substitute to cover a strike. As chronicled in Uptown, Downtown, a 1976 book by Stan Fischler, Luciano was defeated by the confusing braking system, and the train derailed on a jinking set of curves, killing at least 93 people and injuring hundreds more.
The wreck led to a raft of safety improvements, among them, it is believed, the dead man’s
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