Sixty years ago this month, a passenger train, running 20 minutes late, raced through the northwest section of Harris County en route to Dallas. Daylight was fast fading that evening on Jan. 16.

The Rock Island's "Texas Rocket" had been in service since 1937, shuffling Houston travelers to and from Dallas/Fort Worth and points north. The sleek, stainless steel trains were the first diesel-powered passenger trains used by the railroad.

The train had barely passed the crossing at Jackrabbit Road -- FM 1960 today, just east of Willowbrook Mall -- when a truck driven by Ray A. Dawson of Dallas broadsided the second diesel engine powering the train.

Dawson was thrown from the cab and crushed under the 16 tons of reinforcing steel he was transporting to Dallas.

And with that, he became the sixth person in two years to die at what was then called the "Dead Man's Crossing."

As you might have read before, this wasn't the only dangerous stretch of road in Harris County to get saddled with a macabre nickname. Near Pasadena, the La Porte Road crossing over Sims Bayou became so notorious in the 1930s for its fatal crashes that the bridge there came to be known as "The Kiss of Death" bridge.

As Dawson's truck slammed into the train, a wall of flames erupted as the truck's fuel tank ruptured.

"Passengers were knocked in every direction," Edward Taylor told Houston Chronicle reporter Zarko Franks. "Children were screaming and we were all looking for windows to escape."

Dallas banker J. Willis Gunn noted that Dawson remained trapped under the steel as passengers fled the train.

"It's a disgrace he wasn't freed sooner," he told Franks. "Five emergency vehicles came up and not one had a spade or a shovel."

Twenty-six on board the 11-car train were injured.

Days later, on Jan. 19, 1959, the Chronicle reported that a warning signal would be installed at that crossing. A concrete base for the signal was already in place at the time of the crash.

Today, the nickname has faded, but trains still pass through the busy crossing.