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Name: The Great Circus Train Wreck of 1918: Tragedy on the Indiana Lakeshore
Brand: Richard M. Lytle
SKU: 9781596299313
Price: 21.99 USD
Availability: InStock

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The Great Circus Train Wreck of 1918: Tragedy on the Indiana Lakeshore

The Collapse of Richmond's Church Hill Tunnel

Paperback

$21.99

Around Cranberry Lake

The Great Circus Train Wreck of 1918: Tragedy on the Indiana Lakeshore

9781596299313

$21.99

What really happened on the circus train in 1918? Read the story of this tragedy for the entertainment industry of the time.

In the cool, pre-dawn hours on a June night in 1918, a train engineer closed his cab window as he chugged toward Hammond, Indiana. He drifted to sleep, and his train bore down on the idle Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus Train. Soon after, the sleeping engineer's locomotive plowed into the circus train. In the subsequent wreckage and blaze, more than two hundred circus performers were injured and eighty-six were killed, most of whom were interred in a mass grave in the Showmen's Rest section of Chicago's Woodlawn Cemetery. Join local historian Richard Lytle as he recounts, in the fullest retelling to date, the details of this tragedy and its role in the overall evolution and demise of a unique entertainment industry.

Banks Lake

9781467109444

$23.99

Every year, Banks Lake is visited by thousands of tourists from all over Washington State and beyond for recreation. People fish, boat, swim, hike, and camp around Banks Lake, a 27-mile equalizing reservoir created for the Grand Coulee Dam as part of the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project. However, even before Banks Lake, the Upper Grand Coulee was a vibrant, inhabited land. Bits and pieces of the fragmented history often surface; there were orchards and seemingly endless fields of golden wheat. Filled with ranches and farms, cattle roamed freely. Stories of highways, railroads, and towns now under the waters of the equalizing reservoir are waiting to be discovered. This book pulls back the waves of Banks Lake and the layers of time to reveal the lost and forgotten history that was inundated with the waters of the Grand Coulee Dam.

The Collapse of Richmond's Church Hill Tunnel

9781609493417

$21.99

Explore the facts and mysteries surrounding the history and collapse of Richmond, Virginia's Church Hill Tunnel. A must for fans of railroad and Richmond history.

Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, was in shambles after the Civil War. The bulk of Reconstructionbecame dependent on the railways, and one of the most important links in the system was the Church Hill Tunnel.

The tunnel was eventually rendered obsolete by an alternative path over a viaduct, and it was closed for regular operation in 1902. However, the city still used it infrequently to transport supplies, and it was maintained with regular safety inspections. The city decided to reopen the tunnel in 1925 due to overcrowding on the viaduct, but the tunnel needed to be strengthened and enlarged. On October 2, 1925, 190 ft. of the tunnel unexpectedly caved in, trapping construction workers and an entire locomotive inside.

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the tunnel and the mystery surrounding its collapse. There were cave-ins and sink holes above the surface for decades after the tunnel was sealed up, and in 1998, a reporter from the Richmond Times-Dispatchdid an investigation, trying to determine the current condition of the tunnel. In 2006, the Virginia Historical Societyannounced its efforts to try and excavate the locomotive and remaining bodies.

Around Cranberry Lake

9781467103114

$24.99

From a small rural retreat to a center of industry and finally into protected wildlands, this is the story of the Adirondacks' Cranberry Lake.

Initially, the remote Cranberry Lake region attracted hunters and fishermen such as Reuben Wood, world-champion fly caster, as well as artists like Frederic Remington, writer Irving Bacheller, and Arts and Crafts movement philosopher Elbert Hubbard. Between 1886 and 1896, when railroads began to approach the lake, both industry and tourism flourished. Extractive industries like mining and lumbering coexisted with a lively trade catering to leisure travelers and recreationists, though the same industries depleted much of the lake's resources. Several generations later, the natural beauty and wilderness characteristic of the Cranberry Lake region has been restored, and outdoor recreation is still an enticing draw to the area, though the stumps of old trees still litter the land like pockmarks of history, never to fully heal.

Ohio Train Disasters

9781626192584

$23.99

In nearly a century of heavy rail travel in Ohio, a dozen train accidents stand out as the most horrific. In the bitter cold, just after Christmas 1876, eleven cars plunged seventy-five feet into the frigid water below. The stoves burst into flames, burning to death all who were not killed by the fall. Fires cut short the lives of forty-three people in the head-on Doodlebug collision in Cuyahoga Falls in 1940 and eleven people in a train wreck near Dresden in 1912. Author Jane Ann Turzillo unearths these red-hot stories of ill-fated passengers, heroic trainmen and the wrecking crews who faced death and destruction on Ohio's rails.