Roger Bresnahan, legend has it, was unhappy with the decision and was determined to get it reversed. The catcher and manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, Bresnahan was quick to flash his temper when sticking up for his players, but the men in blue he was confronting were not umpires. They were railroad conductors. The Cardinals, having just lost to rookie Grover Cleveland Alexander and the Phillies that afternoon, were taking the overnight train from Philadelphia to Boston and found themselves right behind the engine. Experienced rail travelers, they knew this was not the place to be. The players settled in their sleeping berths, and the train pulled out at 7:24 p.m. Sleep was impossible — with the thunderous roar and incessant whistling of the steam locomotive, and cinders drifting through the windows. On top of that, a record heat wave was going on. Bresnahan had leverage. Baseball teams were steady railroad customers, and he rode the train under protest ... or did he? There were different versions reported about this ill-fated run of the "Federal Express" on July 10-11, 1911. When the train reached railroad yards in New York, its cars were reshuffled. Daniel Kissner, the train's brakeman, later said the Cardinals' Pullmans were moved to the rear in response to Bresnahan's complaint. Bresnahan and the players said the switch was random, done because it was easier for the railroad. In any event, the move to the rear did not help the players get a good night's sleep. But it saved their lives, freed them to help save other lives and left them, one player would say, "with enough horror to last all through my life." At 3:32 a.m. on that steamy Tuesday morning, the Federal Express jumped off the rails in Bridgeport, the massive locomotive hurtling over the embankment and smashing onto Fairfield Avenue, car after car forming a mountain of smoldering wreckage, burying the passengers. At that moment, the St. Louis Cardinals became Connecticut's team — first responders at one of the worst transportation disasters in state history. Theirs were the only cars that remained on the track, and the 22 members of this professional baseball team scrambled down the 18-foot embankment, some in pajamas and bare feet. "Many a victim of the wreck owes his life to the promptness of the St. Louis National League Baseball team," reported The Hartford Times the following afternoon. As it was, 14 people lost their lives, and 47 were seriously injured among the 150 passengers. By all accounts, the death toll would have been higher, the suffering of survivors prolonged, had Bresnahan not exhorted his players to quick, unselfish action. Route Of President And Fish The Federal Express was called "President Taft's Train," because William Howard Taft often had his private car attached for trips to Yale, his alma mater, or his "Summer White House" in Beverly, Mass. But he had returned to Washington a few days earlier and remained for most of that sweltering July. Taft might have enjoyed this trip while taking the opportunity to catch up with one of his former students, Miller Huggins, the Cardinals' second baseman. As a law student at the University of Cincinnati, Huggins was undecided about his future, but Professor Taft, the story goes, who once wanted to be a ballplayer, had advised Huggins to follow his passion. While the president was not on board, the federal government did provide some special guests. The U.S. Fish Commission had contracted the railroads to carry a car with dozens of drums of young trout to stock rivers and streams in Connecticut. Thirty drums were to be left at Stamford, and the government-owned car with the remaining trout was to be detached from the train and left at Bridgeport. The fish played an indirect role in the disaster. On schedule, the Federal's Washington-to-Boston journey was an arduous 13 1/2 hours. The great Hell Gate Bridge, which would connect the Pennsylvania and New Haven lines in Queens, was not completed until 1917. At this time, trains heading through were pulled to the docks at Jersey City, N.J., then the cars — passengers staying put — were pushed onto massive steam barges that chugged across New York Harbor and around the southern tip of Manhattan to Port Morris in the Bronx. This allowed for the cars, grouped in threes, to be rearranged at the Harlem River Yard. When the ferrying of the nine cars was complete and the train reassembled, a New Haven Railroad crew led by engineer Arthur M. Curtis and fireman Walter A. Ryan, both from the Bronx, climbed into the cab of engine No. 413 and a "ten-wheeler," capable of reaching 100 mph, took over the Federal Express. Before Curtis began to open the throttle, the yardmaster gave him the orders; he would be switching over to Track 2 at Bridgeport so the fish car could be detached. Curtis, 35, father of two, had a terrible case of the measles that spring, and the missed work wiped out the family's savings. He was taking on any extra shift he could, and when L.L. Fowler of West Haven asked for this night off, Curtis agreed to run the Federal, as he had several times recently. The ferrying process had taken longer than expected. The Federal left the Bronx at 1:52 a.m., 57 minutes late. And the ballplayers were now in the rear. "The protest of Mr. Bresnahan and the players was made between Washington and Jersey City," Kissner told The New York Times. "And when the train reached Harlem Yards it was made up anew." The Boston and St. Louis papers, reflecting the players' version, said the switch was an "error" by the railroad, unbeknownst to the team. It was done "for no other reason than because it was a little easier to make up the train," Bob Harmon, the Cardinals' young star pitcher, explained in a letter to his parents. When James T. Sullivan of the Boston Globe boarded the players' train at Providence, Bresnahan told him, "Our car, I was told, would ordinarily have been near the engine. If that were so, the St. Louis team would be wiped off the map." The weekly Bridgeport Herald, in its account five days later, offered another version: The players objected to the switch, but the train crew, trying to reassemble the train as quickly as possible, said they had no choice. A Rowdy, Colorful Period The other players laughed and hooted on Opening Day in 1907 when Roger Bresnahan lumbered out onto the field with his legs sheathed from ankles to knees, equipment seen only in cricket. In his years as a catcher, Bresnahan experimented with papier mache shields, protective headgear and extra padding. This caught on and soon every catcher was wearing "shin guards," the innovation that etched Bresnahan's name into baseball history.

Bresnahan, who was born in Toledo, Ohio, and also died there, was shrewd and gritty — a player's player who earned the respect of his famous Giants teammates, especially fiery manager John McGraw. He caught every one of Christy Mathewson's 27 scoreless innings in the World Series of 1905. When the Cardinals wanted to make Bresnahan a playing manager, McGraw traded him to St. Louis in 1909. With his rugged features and thick black hair, always parted in the middle, he seemed perfectly cast for the difficult role of keeping players in line. This was an era when players drank and smoked heavily, bringing the habits of the farms, the mines and the mill towns to the clubhouse. Players of the time were becoming resentful over the money they were putting into owners' pockets. There was talk of forming an outlaw league in which players would run the show, and gamblers were beginning to follow teams, offering money to a player who would be willing to make a pitch a little too fat or let a grounder go through his legs. The Cardinals, who had not had a winning record since 1901, were a cross-section of characters representing this rowdy, colorful period. They were the youngest team in the league, the average age 26. Only Huggins, 33, and Bresnahan, 32, were over 30. When the Cardinals beat Pittsburgh before a raucous crowd in St. Louis on July 2 to move into fourth place, the "first division," the Boston Herald ran a huge picture of Bresnahan and called it "an event as surprising to the world as the discovery of a new comet." Then the Cardinals packed their trunks full of straw hats, detachable starched collars, thin neckties and linen suits, headed east and kept winning. As they boarded the train in Philadelphia on the evening of July 10, they were on a 23-14 run, 10 games over .500 and just three games out of first place. Baseball was not played on Sundays in Philly at this time, so the Cardinals and Phillies had to finish their series on Monday, usually the travel day. That's why the Cardinals had to take the overnight trip to Boston, where they were scheduled to play four games against the last-place Rustlers (later known as the Braves) at South End Grounds in Boston, starting on the following afternoon of July 11. By now, several of the players had crewcuts to help offset the heat — 10 days in a row over 90 degrees and four days over 100. They tucked their uniforms in their carry-on suitcases and put their fancy stuff in trunks for the baggage car. With the delay, the rail journey promised to get them into Boston by 8:30 a.m. — in time for breakfast before heading to the park Tuesday afternoon. Nightmare At 3:32 A.M. Train wrecks were all too common in the age of steam. A particularly devastating accident in Mississippi in 1900 cost engineer Casey Jones his life and immortalized him in song. There were 324 deaths on U.S. rails in 1910. The Federal Express was filled to capacity that night, with Washingtonians heading north to escape the heat and many members of the Society of Christian Endeavor, their convention over, climbing aboard in Atlantic City, N.J. It made 11 stops between New York and Bridgeport, falling further behind schedule. It was an hour and 20 minutes late after the 30 canisters of trout were unloaded at Stamford and a pause while a higher-priority, fast-mail train passed. There were still about 150 passengers on board as Curtis threw open the throttle and Ryan, 25, shoveled coal into the fire to increase the steam pressure, trying to make up time through Fairfield County on the express track No. 4. From the Interstate Commerce Commission's official report, filed two months later, and from the vivid accounts that appeared in Hartford, Bridgeport, Philadelphia, New York, Boston and St. Louis newspapers, here's what happened next: As the train crossed from Fairfield into Bridgeport and approached the Burr Road Tower — which old-time railroad men believed was occupied by a ghost — Clarence W. Hemingway, working in the tower, threw the switch and activated the necessary signals. With the station just 1 1/2 miles away, the train would have to cross here from the inside express track to the outside track No. 2 to make its stop. The rules of the road called for locomotives to slow to 15 mph to navigate the type of crossover that was installed there. But Hemingway was horrified to see the Federal Express tear past his perch at 60 mph. Perhaps Curtis, with his increased workload, had forgotten about the fish and the upcoming stop at Bridgeport; perhaps he had forgotten where the crossover, which had been installed recently, was located. Maybe he had fallen ill. There was no black box, of course, but the engine's throttle was later discovered wide open. "Why the engineman would disregard both the signals and the rule governing this crossover and not control the speed of the train," wrote chief inspector H.W.Belnap in his report for the ICC, "is a matter of mere conjecture." Within seconds, Hemingway heard the crash and began to run toward it. Then, remembering a fatal, multi-train crash in Fairfield a month before and that other trains would be following along this busy stretch of track, he returned to the tower to notify the necessary people. Engine No. 413, weighing about 100 tons, hit the crossover at 3:32 a.m. and went airborne, taking out one of the girders of the 85-foot steel bridge across Fairfield Avenue, riding for a few agonizing seconds on the wooden ties, hurtling over the side of the viaduct, landing on its side and sliding until it hit a stone wall 400 feet from the point of derailment, near a stone on which someone had painted, "Prepare to meet thy God." Curtis and Ryan jumped clear out of the cab and were thrown against the stone abutment, their burned, mangled bodies found under the coal tender. After the coal tender, a baggage car that carried the Cardinals' gear, the government's fish car, and the wooden day coach, which had 18 passengers, followed in the engine's deadly path down the embankment. The day coach was completely crushed by the heavy steel sleepers that landed on top of it. Three more sleeper cars tipped over and slid down the embankment and landed on their side or upside down, but remained intact, allowing passengers to escape through the windows. The coupling between the sixth and seventh cars came undone, and the seventh came to a stop hanging precariously over the edge of the viaduct. Officer Riley of the Bridgeport police, walking his overnight beat along Fairfield Avenue, heard the crash, saw the sparks from the severed electrical trolley wires light up the black of the morning and rushed to a call box. This resulted, crucially, in the electricity being turned off. At 1941 Fairfield Ave., James Horan and his wife rushed out of his front door to see all this wreckage on their front lawn, and James ran to a nearby fire department call box.

In the eighth car, Bresnahan, still unable to sleep in the oppressive heat, was sitting up in his bed smoking when the train derailed. As the car thumped along the ties, the traveling secretary, Herman Seekamp, sleeping above him, woke and said, "We have struck something." Bresnahan said no, they were still moving. The younger players and two St. Louis reporters were also in this car, which finally came to a violent stop, tilting to its right but resting up against a telegraph pole. Everyone tumbled from their berths and landed in a heap in the center aisle. "We are all right," Bresnahan heard one of them say. "We are not all right," cried outfielder Otto McIvor. "For God's sake, look out ahead!" Bresnahan immediately called for calm. Sports writers R.J. Collins and William J. O'Connor were in Bresnahan's car, and wrote "eyewitness accounts" that appeared in papers across the country: "Bresnahan's voice was heard over the screams of the young men," wrote O'Connor, 23, "and Roger admonished them to take their time and get out." Pitcher Rube Geyer hurt his wrist, but not seriously. Rube Ellis reported a bump on the head. "Boys, we are needed up front," Bresnahan yelled after peering out of a window. "If ever a man lived who possessed a cooler head [than Bresnahan], I have not heard of him," Lee Magee said. "We were barely picking ourselves up off the floor. He seemed to be the first to recognize an accident had occurred and our assistance might be needed. He was the first man to leave our coach and we all followed." In the ninth and final car, Harmon felt the rocking and bumping, "and soon we came to such an abrupt stop that I nearly went through the end of my berth." Some players had pulled on trousers over their pajamas and a few had their shoes handy; others were in pajamas and bare feet as they scrambled down the embankment. Harmon, whose letter to his foster parents later ran in the weekly Liberal (Mo.) News, came out barefoot and, like his teammates, rubbed his eyes in disbelief. "Such a site I never expect to see again if I live a thousand years," he wrote. "Knowing that the train was crowded with people made it an awful sight. … I recognized it would be impossible to do much on account of so much glass. So I climbed back up [to get my shoes]." The wooden pieces of the baggage car had caught fire, illuminating the scene. Sunrise was still two hours away. "We got axes from our cars and the next one," Steve Evans said as he described the events for reporters in Boston a few hours later, "and started clearing away the wreckage so we could get at the bodies of the dead and the dying." They immediately heard a scream. Bresnahan and Ivey Wingo, 20, rushed over and pulled a woman out of the window of one of the capsized cars just as the fire was spreading near her. Rookie infielder Wally Smith, 23, probing the wreckage, found two infants crying, but apparently unhurt. "He picked them up," Evans said, "and stared in search of their mothers. He didn't find them. "The flames of the baggage car were soon extinguished and we were left in darkness once more." 'Blood-Curdling Screams' Huggins, the tiniest of players, burrowed into a tight spot and helped a man out. Harmon and Mike Mowery both had axes and were swinging them aggressively. It would be at least half an hour before the rickety vehicles of 1911, some of them horse-drawn, could get the trained responders to the scene. Mrs. Horan opened her door and, joined by neighbors, began making coffee and gathering blankets. The players and other able passengers who had climbed out the windows of the overturned cars were the only ones capable of helping in the critical first moments. "The first men to rush to the assistance of the passengers in the wrecked coaches were the men of the St. Louis ball team," according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, citing eyewitnesses. "The ballplayers were worth a thousand ordinary helpers in an affair of this sort. When the firemen and police and the first squad of physicians arrived, they found the ballplayers working like Trojans and many lives were undoubtedly saved by them." Even in the middle of the night it was still nearly 80 degrees, much hotter near the wreckage, where the work went on. "It was terrible for us to see," Bresnahan said, "the people mangled before our eyes. Everyone worked like a Trojan, helping the injured and getting out the dead as much as we could. But it was nerve wracking. The screams of the injured were blood-curdling." With all the hot coal, the downed live wires and the splintered wood, it was a miracle that no one was electrocuted, or that the entire mountain of wreckage did not go up in flames, killing the dozens who were still trapped. Players still without shoes were getting cuts on their feet. At about 4 a.m., Capt. Daniel Thompson of the fire department arrived with engines, a steamer and two hook-and-ladder trucks, up-to-date equipment chief Ed Mooney had fought hard to acquire, and put out what small fires had broken out. Soon Mooney himself was on the scene, directing his men with fire axes as they took over, still aided by the ballplayers. All the policemen working the overnight and early-morning shifts in the city arrived, too, along with three surgeons from St. Vincent's Hospital. The Lowdermilk brothers grabbed a stretcher from the first ambulance and, as a surgeon holding a lantern carefully instructed them, they extricated an injured man from the twisted steel. More doctors followed, and whatever automobiles could be found in the neighborhood were used as ambulances. The Horans' front lawn became a make-shift triage center. By 5:30 a.m., daybreak, the railroad's crane car and other wreckage equipment finally arrived with more men, and large pieces could be moved. As the sun came up, the gruesomeness was fully revealed. "Men, women and children were sticking out of the debris," Rebel Oakes told Baseball Magazine later that summer. "Some had arms cut off. Others were minus legs. In some instances, the tops of heads had been crushed." Most of the dead and severely injured were in the day coach, fourth in the train after the reshuffling and now at the bottom of the wreckage, and these were the ghastly images the Cardinals players saw as the sun came up on the pile of rubble that, had they not changed positions, would have been their car. "It would have been good night for several of us," Harmon wrote. Twelve were found dead at the scene; the toll eventually reached 14. .

About 50 of the most seriously injured were taken to nearby hospitals. Others, about 100, were bandaged and comforted and prepared to board a special train the railroad was making up to continue on to Boston. Before they left, at about 7 a.m., 13 members of the Cardinals put on what clothes they could, wiped their faces, climbed up on a completely overturned Pullman car and posed for a photo behind the twisted pipes in the already blistering sun. The faces were grim, and on Pee Wee Hauser's there seemed a hollow look of horror. Lost Season, Shattered Team The afternoon papers were filled with terrible photos of the wreck and praise for the players. Sullivan, having met the train in Providence, was given remarkable accounts from the players. The Boston players, having heard the news, met the Cardinals at Back Bay Station at noon and team officials granted Bresnahan's request to postpone the game that afternoon. "We were lucky," said Bresnahan, his face still grimy. "We won't get over that experience for a while. I can stand a lot, but the groans and screams of those mothers and babies were too much for me. … It was horrible. Horrible. What affect it will have upon the nerve of my men can only be told from their future performance on the diamond." In modern times, the players would certainly have been offered counseling to deal with post-traumatic stress. "My granddad never would have gone for counseling or anything like that," said Bob Trost, 68, of Monroe, La., grandson of Bob Harmon. "He was too proud a man." Perhaps one sign was the players' insistence that they had not asked for their car to be moved. Maybe they were telling the truth and the dazed Kissner was mistaken, or perhaps they did not want it known, fearing they would be somehow blamed, or were irrationally blaming themselves. Dr. Julian Ford, professor of psychiatry at the UConn School of Medicine and director of the school's Center for Trauma Response Recovery and Preparedness, can only imagine how they felt. "There were likely feelings of guilt," Ford said. "They would be blaming themselves for what happened, even though this would be unfair. There would likely be feelings of helplessness — 'we should have known' — and a reliving of the events, imagining what they could, or should have done differently." Little, if anything, was known of post-traumatic reaction or disorders a century ago. Geyer talked of seeing "little babies, crushed and mangled." Oakes talked later of hearing Sgt. Rogers screaming, in vain, for his dead wife and young daughter. These images must have lasted a lifetime. "Hurt? No, we weren't physically hurt," Evans said. "But there are other kinds of hurts. It didn't do me a bit of good to listen to the screams of women and children, men, too, and to see the dying struggle to get out from the wreckage when there was absolutely no chance for them to live." Typical symptoms would have been becoming obsessively superstitious, fearing train travel, turning increasingly to alcohol or difficulty in relationships. "There was probably great peer pressure to just move on and not let it bother them," Ford said. " 'If you let this affect you, then you weren't a man, you weren't part of the team.' This may have been healthy in the sense that it helped some of them move on, but unhealthy in the sense that it fights against the recovery process." The Cardinals slept all day at the Copley Square Hotel, many players sending telegrams back home to assure their families they were unhurt. Some went out to replace lost clothing. They played a doubleheader at South End Grounds on July 12. The Cardinals scored four runs in the top of the first and won 13-6. The second game was called a tie, ended by darkness. St. Louis won six of eight following the train wreck, but then faded badly, 27-40 the last two months, and finished fifth, with a 75-74 record, 20 games behind Bresnahan's old team, the Giants. "It's possible that they tried too hard to get over it," Ford said, "and had some success for a short period, but then lost their rhythm, and what had been coming naturally before was no longer natural for them." A few days later, the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad sent each player a check for $25 as a reward for their efforts, and replaced their lost baggage. Epilogue When word of the crash reached Washington, President Taft was reported to be shaken. The White House announced that in the future, when the president used this train, a "pilot engine" would have to precede it, to test the track. There were other heroes. Bridgeport policeman John Barton was lauded for climbing deep into the wreckage to pull out a family. And 13-year-old Beatrice Clephane, when discovered pinned down, told rescuers she was not seriously hurt and urged them to help others first. Sergeant Rogers and his young son left St.Vincent's hospital to bear the body of his wife and infant daughter to Ohio for burial. Trainmen Furey and Kissner, both initially reported as unlikely to survive, did recover and Furey was remembered for his role when his obituary appeared in The New York Times in 1938. Curtis' body lay unclaimed in the morgue for several days, as railroad officials continually heaped blame upon him, one saying he would have been charged with manslaughter had he survived. The Bridgeport Post, three days after the crash, took sharp exception with the attention given the Cardinals, perhaps reflecting resentment on the part of the city's police and firemen: "Now that the excitement attendant to the wreck has subsided and without any desire to discredit anything the St. Louis baseball players may have done, the largest share of the credit for the rescue work belongs to the firemen and police. The Boston, Providence and New York papers have been making heroes of the ballplayers, who probably did good work, but they did not remain at the scene of the wreck and work like the firemen and policemen did." J.P. Morgan's New Haven Railroad continued to have safety issues, especially with its cross-over switches in this area. This was the second of five major accidents between Stamford and Bridgeport between 1911 and 1913. The ICC and the Connecticut Railroad Commission both concurred with the railroad's initial assessment that the engineer, Curtis, was at fault, but the ICC strongly recommended the railroad upgrade its No. 8 crossover switch with a No. 20, which was capable of handling speeds of 60 mph. The engineer's widow, Alice Curtis, blamed faulty equipment and maintenance, sued the railroad and was awarded $6,000, but her victory was reversed on appeal in 1914.