At six o'clock almost on the dot, as the train slowed to take the curve just outside the Frankfort Junction, Pennsylvania, station, public-relations executive Hubert Holloway looked at his watch and decided he should eat something. Dining service would be shutting down soon. He strode out of his first-class coach on the Congressional Limited, which was headed from Washington, D.C., to New York City. He was enjoying the trip and looking forward to the business meetings he had planned in New York.

A few minutes later he was waiting to be seated in the dining car when a "peculiar crunch" made everyone look up.

A Marine captain, S. G. Kitch, turned to peer out the window when something heavy slammed into his shoulder and head. It was the ceiling. He reeled away, but there was nowhere to fall. "Everything -- people, tables and food -- were hurled into the aisles," he recalled later. "Suddenly a tiny child went sliding by on the floor. We tried to grab it but missed."

It was Labor Day, 1943, in the midst of World War II, and one of the worst passenger-rail tragedies in the U.S. history had begun, one even more horrifying than the terrible derailment Monday in Washington state.

Up ahead of where the Congressional Limited's diners sat, the train's seventh car had shot up into the air, as if doing a wheelie. The 52-ton car now crashed down on its side. It rolled over and over, down the rail embankment and then along a steep grade in the road, until it smashed into the base of the Frankfort Junction signal tower. The tower's steel girders shivered and, with a mighty screech, bent in two. The girders tore through the car's roof "like a giant can opener," decapitating nearly a score of passengers with a single slice and spewing their bodies across the right of way.

The next car followed the first one down the rail embankment, also on its side, metal screaming, the car turning over and spinning until it crashed into the first derailed car, colliding with such force that it fused them into a Frankenstein's train set. The two cars had launched themselves with such fury that they pulled another six cars off the tracks before the coupling broke, splaying the cars "like match sticks across the four tracks of the Pennsylvania's main line, completely blocking it to all traffic."

Screaming echoed down the line. Live wires from the smashed signal tower had set the first derailed car on fire, which the initial wave of rescuers -- men from the town who heard the crash -- rushed to put out.

"Most of the women in the car became hysterical," a passenger told reporters after being pulled unharmed through a window. "But the servicemen climbed around among the seats and quieted them. One woman was terribly hysterical. A sailor slapped her in the face finally, saying, 'Close your damn mouth before everybody here becomes hysterical!' That quieted her down."

The hysterics were understandable. Even some of the servicemen onboard who'd been in combat had never seen carnage like this. Navy Seaman George Davis, on his way home to Verona, New York, had heaved the young woman next to him to the floor as their car started to fall over, in an effort to keep her from being cut by glass. Then he crawled through the rubble, ducking under a dislodged, razor-sharp window frame and around someone's heaving chest.

"There was a lot of screaming," Davis told reporters hours later. "I managed to climb out of the window and I noticed that my car had cracked up against a trestle. After I had looked over the scene I climbed through the window back into the car and helped the girl out. She appeared to have escaped hurt. Then I pulled out several more passengers. Then I went in and saw [another] soldier, apparently dead. He was badly mangled. I couldn't stand it anymore and I had to quit."

He wasn't the only one who couldn't take it. "There were no signs of panic, but there was quite a lot of crying," said Corporal Otis Tellis, an army man based in New Hampshire. "I started to go to the aid of the injured, but I could not stand the sight of the blood all about, and I had to leave."

A Navy commander, a jewelry salesman and a handful of other passengers began to impose some order on the haphazard rescue efforts, organizing uninjured men into teams to find victims and extricate them from the wreckage. "The most pitiful sight I saw," said one passenger, "was a nine-year-old [African-American] girl going around among the injured and the bodies looking for her mother. There was plenty of crying and wailing. I hope I never witness such a thing again."

This terrible tragedy had happened, it would turn out, because of one "burnt-out journal" about the size of a milk carton. The axle bearings on each train car were packed in lubricated journals, or "hot boxes," to minimize friction on the truck frame. When a journal on the first coach car leaked or dried out, the bearings overheated, causing the axle to snap when the train rounded a tight corner. The result was one of the worst train disasters in American history. The early counting of dead toted up 78 corpses, with the expectation that the number would climb when all the train cars had been officially cleared.

"The first rescue workers to arrive said that the whole area was filled with dazed and injured men, women and children," the New York Times reported the next morning. Dozens of passengers were trapped in the wreckage of the first two coach cars, uncertain whether one of the severed limbs lying nearby might be theirs. The Times's reporter added:

When the first horror-stricken rescuers arrived they found that both ends of the two coaches had been sealed by the shattered steel of their vestibules. Police, firemen and railroad crew were forced to cut away tangled steel wreckage with acetylene torches before they could remove many of the occupants of these two cars.

The rescue effort did not get any easier. Aside from the gore, the coach cars had collapsed like deflated accordions, meaning passengers surely were buried within the interior rubble of the trains, some possibly alive. And darkness was coming on fast, requiring rescuers to use up valuable time stringing floodlights over the wreckage so they could work on through the night.

It would take six hours to remove all of the passengers from the wreckage. Dozens of priests descended on the scene, where they administered the last rites of the church to anyone who was seriously injured.

While all of this was going on, a possible national security crisis loomed. A number of passengers recalled seeing a lieutenant on the train who was trailed constantly by four armed guards. The assumption was that he was carrying top-secret papers that had to be delivered immediately. After the wreckage was cleared of victims, firefighters and servicemen continued to crawl through the smashed coaches in search of attaché cases or any paperwork that looked like it might be important. The lieutenant with the bodyguards was never identified, nor were any war-related papers found.

Hubert Holloway survived the crash without serious injury, and he helped with the rescue effort. The PR executive told reporters about his experience, insisting that he'd never felt so lucky in his life. Hours later, he and other survivors boarded a special train that took them to New York. Holloway, deeply involved in war-bond work, kept his meetings.

The terrible train accident quickly fell from the headlines. There was a war on.

-- Douglas Perry