One passenger train leaves Chicago’s Union Station at 12:35 p.m. and travels west at 85 miles per hour. Another passenger train leaves Chicago’s Union Station at 12:35 p.m., merges onto the same track, and travels at an identical speed two minutes behind the first. What happens when the lead train abruptly stops and the second doesn’t?

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Naperville is the fifth largest city in Illinois, a giant and affluent Chicago suburb voted by Money five years ago as the second best place to live in the entire country. It’s home to well-performing schools, green space, and plenty of jobs. “It’s a suburb that does all the suburban things,” says UIC urban planning professor Robert Bruegmann, “but slightly better.”

In the mid-1940s, Naperville was vastly different. Not entirely urban or rural, its 5,000 residents worked primarily on farms or at a factory run by the Kroehler Furniture Company. There was a college on the edge of town, but no hospital. The city still hadn’t razed the Pre-Emption House—the oldest continuously operating bar in the state and a vestige of Naperville's pioneer roots. And the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad operated tracks that ran right along 4th Avenue.

On April 26, 1946, around noon, 150 people boarded Burlington’s Advance Flyer, a nine-car “fast train” heading from downtown Chicago to Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska. Another 175 hopped on the Oakland-bound Exposition Flyer, advertised as “The Scenic Way to California—Thru the Colorado Rockies and the Feather River Canyon by Daylight.” (The trip took two days, with stops in Denver and Salt Lake City.) At the helm of the second train was W.W. Blaine, a 68-year-old engineer who had worked 40 years at the railroad and had operated diesel locomotives since 1933, the first year they were put in service on his line. To be sure, Blaine was old for his job; the railroad’s standard retirement age was 70. But he had passed all of his signal tests and the Illinois Interstate Commerce Commission ranked Burlington first in safety every year between 1930 and 1944. The passengers on board expected a smooth, relaxing ride into the western plains.

Burlington operated three tracks just west of Chicago’s city limit; the two outside tracks were reserved for freight and commuter trains, while intercity liners used the center track. Since the pair of Flyers were scheduled to depart Chicago at the exact same time, the railroad decided to treat them as one train, letting the Advance Flyer speed along in the lead at a marginally faster pace. Everything went just as planned for about 25 minutes. And then everything went terribly awry.

The Tribune would call it a “caprice of fate” (April 26, 1946). Nobody ever figured out what actually happened. But something—a small rock, perhaps, or a piece of metal—shot out from the Advance Flyer’s undercarriage, spooking the engineer enough to force an unscheduled stop near the Naperville station. Slowing down to check the running gear so quickly after taking off was an unusual move, and the crew employed every available safeguard to protect its clients, setting the emergency control system into operation and sending flagman James Tangey out the rear car to, in his words, “try to stop the train behind us.”

That proved impossible. Blaine and his Exposition Flyer blew through both a yellow caution and red stop signal, rounded a curve, and roared past Tagney. Blaine’s fireman, a frightened man named E.H. Crayton, saw the parked train in the distance and leapt from the speeding locomotive, only to hit the ground and die instantly upon contact. Blaine stayed inside and leaned on the brake for as long as he could. A mere 90 seconds after The Advanced Flyer rolled to a stop, The Exposition Flyer—chugging along at 45 miles per hour—barreled into its caboose, tore through its roof, and “plunge[d] down with terrific force upon the very floor and trucks of the car” (Tribune). Blaine’s front wheels were sheared off by the impact. “I never heard anything like it before or since to compare it to,” Jim Dudley, then an eighth grader at a nearby school, told the Tribune in a 1988 retrospective. “It was like an explosion.”

Dust, smoke, and debris scattered across the nearby countryside. The smell of ashes hung in the air. “The scene of the disaster,” the Tribune noted later that day, “was one of twisted and gnarled confusion, with huge luxury passenger coaches strewn across torn tracks like abandoned toy trains.” For a few seconds after the collision, the passengers on board made little noise. Then the shock wore off. “A moment of tragic silence was broken,” the AP wrote, “by screams and cries for help from the dying and injured.” The rear of The Advanced Flyer absorbed the bulk of the damage—most of those sitting in the rear coach and diner car were killed straightaway. Those seated further up the train escaped the worst, but were rocked nonetheless. “Things happened so fast,” one passenger said, “that I don’t remember what happened to me. I was doubled up suddenly and my knees were pushed against my chest.”

Startled by the clamor, all 800 employees at the Kroehler Furniture factory ran out to help. So did 50 students studying at North Central College. A police officer nearby made a series of frantic phone calls, recruiting doctors, nurses, and ambulances from neighboring towns. Within a matter of minutes, a full-blown rescue crew was assembled. They worked feverishly, but the task of pulling out bodies from the wreckage proved difficult. To reach the injured and dead, the police were forced to burn through the train plates using acetylene torches; eight hours after the crash, the authorities still hadn’t cut through every upturned car.

Those that were fished out were carried into the Kroehler warehouse—set up as a temporary hospital—on mattresses, because Naperville didn’t even own stretchers at the time. Miraculously, Blaine survived, crawling out through his cab’s window before making his way to first aid, where he was treated for a skull fracture. Others weren’t so lucky. Delbert Boon, a sailor from Missouri, was rushed to a hospital in adjacent Aurora, where he sent a cryptic telegram to his parents: “Come and see me. Was in train accident.” He died 30 minutes later.

It took 27 hours to clear one of Burlington’s three tracks, and three days to remove the entirety of the rubble. Thousands of curious locals jammed Naperville’s highways and streets while crews worked to catch a glimpse of the disaster. In total, 47 people eventually lost their lives in the accident, while another 125 were injured. It was, and still is, one of the worst crashes in state history.

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So what the hell happened? Burlington surveyed its automatic signal systems right away and found that their lights had indeed functioned properly. From his hospital bed, Blaine—charged with manslaughter by state’s attorney Lee Daniels* to ensure he appeared at an inquest—insisted he saw the yellow caution and applied his brakes at once, but couldn’t slow the train down in time because he was moving too fast and his train was too light. (The Exposition was pulling nine cars that day, instead of its usual haul of 12.)

His crew mates weren’t convinced. At a public hearing set up by Burlington officials (and assailed by Blaine’s lawyer) on April 28, a road foreman testified that he inspected the locomotive shortly after the wreck and found the brake valve in the “service” position, not the “emergency” position. The Exposition’s conductor went so far as to say he noticed “no application of brakes whatsoever.” Brakeman C.W. Norris agreed with the foreman, telling his bosses that “there was never any emergency application the day of the accident.”

To test this hypothesis, the ICC and Burlington ran a series of simulations on the Naperville track a week after the crash, using a diesel train that paralleled The Exposition in length and weight. Speeding along at 85 miles per hour, a different (and younger) engineer applied the brakes immediately when he saw the yellow light and was able to slow his train to a stop 934 feet from the rear of the standing Advance Flyer. During the final test, in which he applied both service and emergency brakes when he saw the red light, he still nearly avoided contact, stopping with the engine and just one car past the collision point. The evidence did not reflect well on Blaine.

In the end, though, the embattled engineer was absolved of major blame by both the ICC and a DuPage County grand jury. In an October verdict, the latter declined to take action against the Burlington railroad or the crews of either train, instead charging everyone involved with nine “negligent acts,” ranging from improper scheduling to poor intercommunication between conductors. Rule changes followed: the ICC mandated in 1951 that trains were only permitted to exceed 79 miles per hour if automatic train stop equipment was in place, and most rail agencies still don’t mix cars of different weights on the same train. Blaine retired shortly thereafter.

Cult street photographer Charles Cushman was on hand to document the grisly scene. His photos, along with the rest of his work, are hosted online by Indiana University. Also keep an eye out for Naperville resident Chuck Spinner’s upcoming book, which will detail the stories of the victims.

*His grandson would later serve as the Speaker of the House in Illinois.

Derrick Rose needs to get healthy, quickly. Chicago’s star guard has missed over 40 percent of his team’s games this season because of nagging injuries, the latest of which is causing a wave of panic to wash over otherwise-optimistic Bulls fans who fear that bumps and bruises could spoil what’s been a dominant season thus far. Sure, the Bulls carry the deepest bench in the league, yet a poor run of form (and common sense) suggests their GQ cover boy must play at a high level if they have any shot at winning the NBA title. “I’m just trying to survive,” Rose joked earlier this week. So are we, Derrick. So are we.

Thankfully, Rose and other modern athletes now have at their disposal a ton of sophisticated medical procedures and medications to help the body heal, from physical therapy and acupuncture to cortisone injections and advanced surgeries. Professionals—whose livelihood depends on proper functioning arms and legs—will even spend thousands and thousands of dollars on remedies that have not yet passed clinical trials, like the injectable anti-inflammatory drug Toradol or biologics, in which the “patient's own tissues are extracted, carefully manipulated, and then reintroduced to the body.” There are obvious risks in stepping back onto the field or court after undergoing experimental treatments—just ask the owners of drugged thoroughbreds. But with the biological clock ticking, the more options available, the better.

Dr. George Bennett, a sports medicine pioneer, would be thrilled to see these innovations. Born in the Catskill Mountains in 1885, Bennett was himself a solid baseball player, landing a roster spot on a local semi-pro team by the age of 16. (Friends later described him as a “rather undisciplined little tough guy.”) But medicine was Bennett’s true passion. After high school, he worked a series of odd jobs throughout the Midwest, stashing away his earnings to pay for medical school tuition. Bennett eventually matriculated at the University of Maryland, graduated in 1908, and landed a job at the Johns Hopkins Hospital two years later. He was 25.

It was an interesting time for a sports fan to enter the field, such as it was. “Sports medicine,” as we understand it today, was in no way a recognized discipline. In the locker room, “it was considered effete and unnecessary to have a doctor in attendance” (Washington Post; March 10, 1962), and trainers—most of whom had no science background—applied the lion’s share of treatments, which often meant rubbing sore muscles with balms. At the same time, doctors were starting to use x-rays with more regularity, producing detailed images of the body without having to penetrate the skin physically. If an entrepreneurial physician studied how the athlete’s body works and used that knowledge to create procedures that sped up recovery times, he could give daring ballplayers a competitive advantage while making a tidy profit for himself.

So Bennett poured over x-rays, starting with baseball pitchers. And what he found was troubling. While baseball players were subject to the same disabilities of the average laborer, repeating the overhand throwing motion over and over did increase by a wide margin the frequency of degenerative joint injuries. The ligaments, tendons, and muscles in the human arm are just not designed to exert the pressure necessary to propel a baseball 60 feet at rapid speeds, much less make it curve in flight. "Pitching,” Bennett would famously say, “is a most unnatural motion.”

Bennett penned an article in the American Physical Education Review in 1925 laying out the case in plan details that pitching can create long-term structural damage. He followed that piece up with another influential article in 1941, titled “Shoulder and Elbow Lesions of the Professional Baseball Pitcher,” that included x-ray photos and a controversial suggestion that pitchers should use the side-arm delivery (like Walter Johnson) to lengthen their careers. It seems obvious now, but the conclusion was revelatory at the time; pitcher workloads didn’t begin to drop dramatically until the mid-1920s, after Bennett’s first paper was published.

While he studied joints in the lab, Bennett simultaneously built a successful practice, which he would leave Johns Hopkins to run full-time in 1947. Over time, the doctor garnered what sports columnist Red Smith called “the enviable and deserved reputation for remantling athletes” (Baltimore Sun; May 28, 1950). Famous ballplayers liked him for a number of reasons: he was clearly bright, he took sports seriously, and he was not afraid to take orthopedic chances if his client requested it of him. Most importantly, he kept his mouth shut; an AP reporter once joked that the only two words the humble Bennett ever said in public were “operation successful.”

Over the course of his career, Bennett opened up stars like Joe DiMaggio, Dizzy Dean, Lefty Gomez, Pee Wee Reese, and Johnny Unitas.* (Clark Cable and Lord Halifax sought out his counsel, too.) With the help of a colleague at Hopkins, he also invented the first batting helmet, a hat designed with a specialty zipper pocket that held two hard plastic slabs. And once in a while, he worked miracles. 

The career of Roy Sievers (pictured above) is an instructive example. A hulking left fielder, Sievers won the American League Rookie of the Year award in 1949, hitting .306 and slugging 16 home runs for the St. Louis Browns. But in 1951, after struggling during his sophomore season, he broke his right collarbone diving for a ball in the outfield. The next spring, he dislocated the same shoulder making a throw across the diamond. His career appeared finished. Then Sievers visited Bennett. In what the doctor described as “an experiment,” he drilled a hole in Sievers’ bone, cut his tendons, slipped them through the opening, and knotted them together on the other side to keep the bone from rolling out of the shoulder socket. The procedure drastically limited Sievers’ throwing power, forcing a positional move to first base. While supportive of the initial operation, Browns president Bill Veeck and his colleagues in the front office weren’t convinced he would return to form, so they shuffled him off to Washington in a trade for the unremarkable Gil Coan.

This turned out to be a mammoth mistake; Sievers gradually redeveloped strength in his arm and subsequently took the majors by storm, blasting over 20 home runs in nine straight seasons. His best year came in 1957, when Sievers finished third in the AL MVP race, logging 42 home runs and an on-base plus slugging percentage of .967. According to Bennett, Sievers’ recovery was a “miracle of modern medicine” (Washington Post; September 20, 1957). The Senator agreed; during an awards dinner for Bennett the following year, Sievers came up to the doctor with a tear in his eye and thanked him for saving his career. Red Smith aptly described Bennett’s enduring reputation: “This sort of thing has become such a familiar story—the halt and lame of sports have been shuffling off to Baltimore for so long now and in such numbers—that a newspaper reader might be excused if he got the notion that Dr. Bennett had invented the practice of medicine.”

Bennett died in 1962, so he didn’t get to see the creative surgical work of the doctors who followed in his wake. That includes Frank Jobe, who successfully repaired Tommy Johns’ shoulder and launched a medical revolution. But his impact on sports, and the medical profession more broadly, was undeniable. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell might even want to revisit the doctor’s thoughts on football, broadcast in an AP interview on December 18, 1947. “The present helmet is simply equipping a player with armor and the steel mask in front is an open invitation to crush someone’s jaw or knock his teeth out,” he said. “The toll of injuries will continue to mount unless the face mask is legislated out of the game immediately.”

Prescient words from a thoughtful man.

*“After listening to that all-star team of players Dr. Bennett has mended,” Joe Garagiola said at an awards dinner in 1958, “I’m sort of sorry I didn't break my leg."