Fiery 1960 rail disaster killed 14, but it brought out the best in Bakersfield

Yahoo

19-03-2025

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — Hageman Road once cut a straight and direct east-west line through the alfalfa fields and grazing pastures of northwest Bakersfield, including the tiny farm town of Green Acres. Not anymore – not completely.
Now, Hageman has a bump – a curved, northerly detour near Allen Road. The road then curves back to the south before resuming its straight course.
The reason for the rerouting: So that Hageman approaches the Santa Fe railroad tracks at a 90-degree angle, rather than the acute, visibility-skewing angle it took at 5:08 p.m. on March 2nd, 1960.
That's the moment all of Bakersfield shook with the hellish roar of death. The moment a geyser of fire shot 100 feet into the sky. The moment the Santa Fe Railway's Chicago-bound San Francisco Chief passenger train – flying down the tracks at 75 mph, and perhaps faster — smashed into a big rig pulling two trailers containing 8-thousand gallons of highly volatile, freshly refined Kern County fuel oil.
The explosion killed 14 people instantly.
63 others – many of them broken, burned or both – were hospitalized.
The worst train wreck in Kern County history made the front page of the New York Times and inspired a years-long safety review and infrastructure improvements that we still enjoy today.
And it happened 65 years ago.
The driver of the fuel truck – owned by Oglesby Brothers Petroleum Transportation Company – was 48-year-old John Garrett of Bakersfield. There were no rail-crossing arms at the intersection to warn vehicle traffic, only a reflector-sign on the side of the road. A coroner's inquest found that the train, a diesel electric, sounded its horn several times, but Garrett proceeded across the tracks anyway at 5 or 6 mph.
The big rig driver may have realized, in his final moments, what was happening, because witnesses told investigators he turned his vehicle so it was almost parallel to the tracks as the thundering Chief bore down – behind schedule, according to a Santa Fe official, and so possibly exceeding the prescribed speed. The 11-car passenger train might have been going as fast as 90.
We'll never know what Garrett was thinking because he was immediately incinerated. The explosion of metal against metal sent flaming oil raining down. 11 of the 83 passengers were killed, along with two Santa Fe employees, engineer Lanson Snyder and fireman A.H. Brawley, both of Fresno. Their charred bodies were found some distance from the front of the train, as if they had tried to scramble away at the last instant.
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The train rumbled on for a quarter-mile after the crash before it twisted and jerked to an agonizing halt. Some of the cars hung precariously over a 30-foot embankment.
The screams of the trapped, injured and dying pierced the steady roar of the flames.
22-year-old Earl Blakely, a year out of the Army, had just arrived home from work when his father, Fred Blakely called.
'My father said, 'Earl, we've got a bad accident out here,' so I immediately got out here as fast as I could,' said Blakely. 'And we just started working, trying to get people out of the cars.'
Fred Blakely had recently plowed his fields, and ambulances arriving on the scene couldn't get traction in the loose dirt to reach train cars containing the injured.
The farmers of Rosedale and Greenacres came to the rescue.
'It looked like a sea of tractors, coming this way. And they were going across Allen Road,' said Blakely.
A convoy of farm tractors converged on the crash scene to tow the ambulances into position. As doctors tended to the wounded, tractors scraped and flattened the ground so the ambulances could get out again.
24-year-old, Bob Hodel, was driving a company car home from Cal Kern Farm Supply when, about a mile directly ahead, he saw the eruption of flames and the plume of black smoke.
Hodel, now 89, drove straight to the crash scene, arriving before any first responders.
'I was one of the first ones there,' said Hodel. 'I drove up on it and I came upon the carnage. I couldn't believe that,' said Hodel. 'Like Pick-Up Sticks…the cars were all kind of ways and it was a mess. People were coming out of windows. When I drove behind the train wreck and got out of my car there were screams and there was a lot of chaos, then I happened to see him under the metal. And he needed the most help, I thought, and so I centered on him.'
The man's name was Archie, a young man about Hodel's age, and he was buried in twisted metal from the waist down.
'I don't know how he lived,' said Hodel.
Hodel quickly drove home, grabbed his father's acetylene welding torch, and hustled back. For the next several hours, assisted by four or five others, Hodel painstakingly cut away the steel.
'Anyway, we talked to him for about three hours to keep him going. We knew that when we would release the metal that the blood would flown, so we had a doctor there,' said Hodel. 'I remember we lifted the metal up that was pressing his thigh down and it wasn't pleasant. We got him out of there.'
19-year-old Stephen Preston came upon the same nightmarish scene, pulling up alongside the tracks in his red-and-white 1959 Chevy Impala. Preston, now 84 and living in Contra Costa County, had just gotten off work at Brock's Department Store downtown and was driving home.
He lived with his parents, in a house directly behind their family-run, roadside hamburger joint – Glen's Drive-In, which occupied the spot on Rosedale Highway where Country Boy Drive-in now stands.
He saw some haunting things that evening.
'The first passenger car was on its side with the floor partially broken open and you could see, pretty sure it was a man, except he was looking like soup cans, and you could see him through this crack,' said Preston. 'There were three of us and somebody got an axe so we could break some of that metal away and we pulled him out, but he was dead, deceased.'
The eastbound Chief, which left the East Bay city of Richmond, near Oakland, just before noon the morning of the crash, was in pieces.
The Santa Fe Train's four diesel engines, two baggage cars and the first three passenger cars had hurtled off the tracks and lay scattered across a pasture, tangled in a grotesque, geometric design. The inferno was so hot, the truck's motor had been fused into the jumbled, molten mass of the train engine.
Physicians climbed over and around the wreckage, feeling for pulses. Rescue crews rushed cutting torches to the scene to pull out trapped passengers. Floodlights turned the gathering dark into a false day as dozens, then hundreds, gathered at the site of destruction.
Fred and Flossie Blakely's thousand-square foot house was only about 100 yards from the crash scene. With the Blakelys' permission, rescue workers, Santa Fe officials, law enforcement, media and aid workers moved in.
'As the evening wore on, Salvation Army ladies came on and my mom turned the inside of her house over to them and they did a wonderful job. They made sandwiches until there were no more sandwiches to be made,' said Blakely.
Cranes explored the tangled mess looking for survivors – almost tenderly, in the words of a reporter for United Press International. One man, badly injured, finally was freed after eight hours. It could have been worse.
Only one of the truck's two trailers exploded.
'A lot of people were walking around zombie-like. They were in shock, I'm sure…some of them were just staring at this thing wondering, 'Well, what happened,' I think,' said Preston.
It took a dozen fire companies two hours to finally quench the raging flames, and many more hours for first responders to extract all of the passengers, living and dead.
One man who rushed to the scene said he ran about 300 yards to the nearest passenger car. Children inside were crying.
Passengers broke windows and passed the children through, into the arms of those waiting outside to take them.
Radio stations put out a call for blood donations for the injured and the city responded with more than 250 pints. The crash took the life of one of the San Joaquin Valley's most distinguished medical scientists, Dr. Marshall J. Fiese, director of health services at Fresno State College.
Dr. Fiese was prominent among those combating valley fever.
The morning after the crash, Fred Blakely found a huge section of severed rail on his property.
'From where that piece of steel came off the rails, it threw it 250 feet through the air,' said Blakely.
Santa Fe welders cut up the shattered rail into sections and hammered it into anvils, which they gave away to farmers from around the area who came to help out.
The railroad people left the Blakelys with another souvenir. A melted rail car.
'They left the car intact. And they came out here with big excavators, not this modern kind we have now,' said Blakely. 'And they just kept digging until they got it deep enough and wide enough and long enough, they dropped it in there with big cranes and covered it up. That's a big hole.'
As far as anyone knows, that melted passenger rail car is still buried somewhere alongside the railroad tracks, in the Santa Fe right-of-way, southeast of Allen and Hageman roads.
Four days after the crash, Bob Hodel brought his mother Lydia to Mercy Hospital to visit Archie. Mother Hodel, who inspired so many of the recipes at Hodel's – the still-popular restaurant Bob Hodel would open seven years later – brought some of her renowned coffee cake. Archie wrote a letter of thanks after he recovered and made it home to Louisiana.
The pages of the Bakersfield Californian were filled with letters of gratitude – both from victims from around the country who'd finally made it home and from locals.
'For Bakersfield, it was an event, it was a real event, and we were able to pitch in and did what we could,' said Blakely.
For Earl Blakely, the whole tragic experience told him something important about his hometown.
'The folks in this whole Rosedale area – it was wonderful. I mean, what happened was not wonderful, it was horrible. But people all came together. They were all coming over with tools and so forth that they might never have seen again, but that wasn't the issue,' said Blakely. 'It was like what you would expect people to do.'
Days after the crash, a state legislative committee launched a probe of oil tank truck accidents.
Existing laws already required certain vehicles, including school buses and oil tankers, to stop at all rail crossings, regardless of whether a train was known to be approaching. But the legislature wanted to know what more could be done.
Why John Garrett did not stop at the rail crossing was never clear – he had worked for Oglesby Brothers for 10 years and was on his second delivery trip of the day to the Humble Oil Company storage facility. Perhaps he was anxious to get home for dinner to his wife and 11-year-old son, and with no crossing arm to stop him, perhaps he daydreamed himself right into the path of the train.
The cause of the wreck could not be officially determined; the truck driver's death made it impossible.
Oglesby Brothers was named in 39 of the 40 lawsuits filed by the families of crash victims but the company stayed in business until 1979.
The San Francisco Chief, which started its daily run between Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area in 1954, shut down in 1971, when Amtrak began operations.
Today, a concrete train trestle crosses over Allen Road at Santa Fe Way, near Hageman, where the wreck took place, so the possibility of some kind of repeat incident is virtually nonexistent.
The general problem still persists.
Even though the grade crossing collision rate has dropped every year since 1978, many hundreds are killed every year. In 2024, the U.S. saw 2,045 highway-rail grade crossing collisions, resulting in 252 fatalities and 653 injuries.
The rail industry continues to make a compelling case for highway safety – imploring that we respect the speed, weight and power of trains. They always win these collisions – except, as in cases like the 1960 disaster, everyone loses.
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