The Way it Was

100 years ago

Train is in lake

SPOKANE, Wash. -- At least seven lives were lost, seven persons were seriously injured and a score of others sustained cuts and bruises in a wreck of the fast mail train on the Great Northern a mile and a quarter east of Camden, Wash., 35 miles east of Spokane, late yesterday afternoon, when the locomotive, mail, baggage and smoking cars left the rails emerging from a tunnel and plunged over the 70 foot embankment were submerged in the water of the Diamond Lake.

Spreading rails, probably caused by sun kinks, is given as the cause. Immediately after the smoker struck the water there was a blinding flash which spread over the part of the car not submerged and a fire followed.

50 years ago

Italian liner sinks today after crash

NEW YORK -- A violent crash of two huge ocean liners in Atlantic fog late last night took four lives and injured hundreds. One of the vessels, the luxurious Italian liner Andrea Doria, sand mid-morning today.

Before it sank, however, its 1,709 passengers and crew members had been rescued by other ships in on of history's greatest sea epics.

It had collided shortly before midnight off Nantucket Island, Mass., with the Swedish liner Stockholm. The end came at 10:09 a.m., today.