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Fellers sensed that Warring was losing his hold on the wire. “Have you got it, Rusty?” he asked his partner.
“Yes, I have got it,” Warring assured him.
Somebody yelled “Look out!” Without warning, the trolley pole beneath them flew off the live overhead wire, striking Warring in the leg. The 6,600-volt static charge in the warm, humid morning air shocked his leg, causing him to let go of the strain and wire and jump away instinctively. He “started to step and fall” back off the plank three and a half feet above the platform, lost his balance, but caught the plank with his right hand before he might fall off the platform and the car.

Warring straightened himself out, then looked to see where his partner was. Fellers was not visible on top of the plank or the car platform. Warring described the scene:

When I got straightened up I looked around to see where Fellers my partner was. I missed him and I stepped under the trolley to the other side of the car, and saw him lying on the ground on the opposite side of the west bound track. I made a run after I saw where he fell. I made a run on the original tool car, climbed down the ladder, and was the first man to him after the accident.

The other men saw Fellers fall backwards. The steel overhead wire shot against him while he stood on the plank, throwing him off balance and possibly shocking him, from what Harper could see. Buckley witnessed Fellers step or jump off the footwide plank, down three and a half feet to the narrow outer edge of the platform, where he stood for only a moment before falling backward off the car. Hunter saw the trolley pole fly off the wire, then witnessed Fellers’s plummet to the ground. The back of his head struck the south rail of the westbound track.

One of the men hurried to Hammond to summon an ambulance, which took Fellers to St. Margaret’s Hospital. Britt telegraphed Fellers’s father in Iowa, who immediately boarded a train for Chicago and Hammond. That night, before his father could arrive, Fellers died. He was only twenty-seven years old.

The following morning, Britt accompanied the body to Cedar Falls, Iowa, in the company of the deceased lineman’s father. Whether Britt felt responsible for directing the men to use the sawhorses and planks instead of a movable platform—whether he questioned why he had not ensured the construction of handrails along the edges of the platform, no one knows.

* * * * *

Railroading was dangerous work, but not all the dangers were inherently part of railroading. Certain risks existed due to managerial choices, not because of “happenstance” or “the conditions of those times.” In the cut-throat competitive economics of railroad business, company managers often postponed maintenance or repairs on equipment, structures, and rights-of-way to cut operating expenditures. Railroad workers implicitly had to adjust with ingenuity to accommodate more labor tasks, faster paces, deteriorating equipment, and longer work hours. Sixteen-hour work days were commonplace until federal and state laws prohibited the practice in March 1907. Nevertheless, in early June 1910, a South Shore Line conductor inquired of the Indiana Railroad Commission whether the South Shore’s managers could require trainmen to work more than sixteen straight hours. What appeared to an outside observer to be a railroader’s manly behavior or reckless indifference was more truthfully a worker’s requisite skill and nerve in surviving hostile conditions. A rule book for Indiana interurbans in 1908 put each worker on notice that companies disclaimed any responsibility for the conditions they created: “Each employe[e] is expected and required to look after and be responsible for his own safety, as well as to exercise care to avoid injury to others.” Most commonly, the dangers faced by American railroaders were attributed by corporate officials to worker carelessness, not to managerial error or equipment failures. The Indiana Railroad Commission initially perpetuated this condescending corporate myth about the supposed fecklessness of railroaders, commenting in 1909: “What a pity that men who take such good care of others cannot care for themselves!”

Bureaucratic views of workers and their supposed carelessness factored little in the difficult choices that railroad workers had to make when forced to work with inferior or malfunctioning equipment, tight train schedules, and the industrial conditions that might kill a man without warning. As a result, the risk of injury or death cast a constant shadow over one’s daily work. On a hot 9 July 1903, for example, an Aurora, Elgin and Chicago Railroad section hand named Louie Reinke was placing a cross tie in a trench excavated underneath the rails two miles east of Lombard, Illinois. When Reinke swung a pickax to pull the tie under the rails and towards him, the pickax slipped and threw him off balance. He fell backward against the third rail, which electrocuted him instantly. The electric power had been kept live to allow for uninterrupted train operations, but no rubber mats had been placed over the rail to insulate it in case of accidental contact. In Indiana in autumn 1909, a motorman working on a car headlight was killed by an electrical arc. Catenary crossarms fell on a laborer for an Indiana interurban while he was unloading them in spring 1911. In August 1913, Stanislaus Arbacaski, a South Shore Line track laborer, was unloading steel rails at East Chicago when several fell and crushed his foot. On 3 June 1914, a nineteen-year-old electrical lineman for the Michigan Central Railroad barely survived an electrical shock when a telephone wire he was stringing came in contact with a South Shore Line high voltage wire at Tenth and Huron Streets in Michigan City. The young man’s safety belt and spurs prevented him from falling off the pole; he was eventually rescued by firemen. Two and a half months later, a train conductor on the Chicago, South Bend and Northern Indiana Railway stopped his interurban car at St. Marys to call the dispatcher. When he lifted the telephone receiver, a 3,500-volt shock killed him instantly. A summer storm had blown the telephone wire across an overhead electrical wire.

Railroaders at the turn of the twentieth century worked in a system of industrial employment that rewarded those workers who took chances and beat the odds. The fatality rate for trainmen alone peaked in 1891 at nearly ten deaths per thousand workers. Over the next two decades, though, a railroader’s risk of death slowly declined, reaching five in one thousand by 1911. Brakemen on mixed freights faced greater risks—more than eleven deaths per thousand men during the years 1908 through 1910. During the period 1900 through 1916, however, the percentage of railroad workers who suffered serious injuries on the job steadily rose, despite the technological improvements of federally mandated safety appliances such as air brakes and automatic couplers. Among trainmen alone, the injury rate consistently increased each year from about ninety-two work-related injuries per one thousand trainmen in 1900 to about 147 serious injuries among every thousand trainmen in 1916, the worst year for railroaders. When all railroad occupations are considered together, including electrical linemen, shop workers, station agents, section hands, and office clerks, a railroad worker’s risk of suffering a disabling work-related injury nearly tripled between 1891 and 1914 from thirty-three serious injuries per thousand workers to ninety-three injuries per thousand.

At least seven Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway employees died in work-related accidents between 1 July 1911 and 31 December 1918. This number of deaths might seem tragic, but inconsequential in comparison with the thousands of other railroaders killed annually while working for steam railroads during the 1910s. What makes these accidental deaths of workers on the South Shore Line during the 1910s stand out, though, is not the absolute number, but the fatality rate—the proportion of workers killed to workers employed annually and the resulting risks all workers on the interurban line faced every day.

Nationwide between 1911 and 1918, the average fatality rate among all steam railroad employees declined from 2.09 deaths per thousand workers (about one death per 478 employees) in 1911 to 1.75 deaths per thousand (about one death per 571 employees) in 1918, bottoming out in 1915 at 1.34 deaths per thousand (one death per 746 workers). In addition, fragmentary evidence about all interurban railroad employees in Indiana during the early 1910s suggests that working for an interurban line exposed a railroader to far fewer dangers than on a steam railroad, perhaps due to the shorter routes, lighter equipment, and relative absence of carload freight traffic. During the years 1910–1914, the fatality rate among Indiana’s interurban workers ranged from 0.59 deaths per thousand workers to 1.66 per thousand.

The annual fatality rates during the 1910s among railroaders on the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway (CLS & SB) far surpassed the national and state averages most years. Between mid-1911 and 1918, the CLS & SB experienced the death of one railroad employee among an average 251 employees every single year, excluding only the twelve-month period 1 July 1912 to 30 June 1913 and the six-month period 1 July to 31 December 1915, when the railroad neglected to report accident data. Seven workers on the South Shore Line were killed during six years within a seven and one-half year period. At minimum, the annual fatality rate among employees of the seventy-six-mile interurban line between South Bend, Indiana, and Pullman, Illinois, during the 1910s exceeded the annual fatality rates of steam railroads spanning entire regions of the country. A railroader was two or three times more likely to be killed while working for the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway during any given year than if he worked for a high-speed long-haul steam railroad such as the New York Central or the Pennsylvania. When one considers that this dramatically higher risk of injury or death among South Shore Line employees involved only passenger trains before freight service began in January 1917 and accrued over time the longer they remained employed by the railroad company, the dangerous nature of working for this midwestern interurban railroad and the nerve and courage of the men who endured that work year after year become apparent. A South Shore Line trainman or maintenance worker who remained with the railroad between 1913 and 1923 stood roughly a one in twenty-five chance of getting killed on the job during that ten-year period. Good railroaders on the South Shore had to be better than their counterparts on competing steam railroads if they wanted to survive.