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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

THE MOBILE TRAIN WRECK

One morning before I went to work in 1993, I was watching the television and it came across on the
news that a passenger train had run off of a bridge into a swamp north of Mobile Alabama, and that it
was a very, very serious train wreck. The news article stated the approximate time that the wreck
happened, and that it was an eastbound passenger train. I knew that from the wee hours in the morning
when the wreck happened, and since it was an eastbound Amtrak Train, that it absolutely had to be the
train on which Brad and his wife Susanna, and Brad’s mother Julie, were supposed to arrive back in
Lake City at about noon that day, and there was just no way to avoid the certain assumption that it was
their train.

1 immediately got on the phone and called Amtrak Headquarters in Washington D.C. and they
confirmed that it was indeed the Sunset Limited, which is the train they were on. The lady who talked to
me from Am Track in Washington told me that fortunately there were no fatalities. (A barge had hit the
bridge in the dark and mis-aligned the railroad tracks.)

That made me feel better for a few minutes until 1 heard another TV broadcast, which this time stated
there were many, many fatalities, and that no one knew yet just exactly how many, but it could have
been in the hundreds. It turned out later that the Mobile Train Wreck was the worst train wreck in
American history.

I did not know what to do, or where to get any further information, and I strongly considered getting in
my airplane and flying to Mobile. Then my better sense caused me to ask myself “now when I get to
Mobile, where in the hell am 1 going from there, and what can I do?” Inasmuch as 1 did not even know
the exact location ofthe wreck, and as it turned out later there was no place within miles of the train
wreck that a plane could have landed, 1 gave up on that idea and just waited to hear something.

A few hours later I received a phone call, from my strapping big son Brad, who called me to let me
know they were alright, but he was crying like a baby, and it was not long before 1 was doing the same.
He told me “Daddy there’s more dead people laying out on the dock up here than you will ever want to
see in one pile, he said there’s more people dead than I ever imagined that was on that train, and it looks
as if we might have been one of the very few that got off of it alive.”

After all of this happened, and they returned home, in some ill-fitting clothes Amtrak had bought for
them to come home in, Brad relayed to me exactly what had happened, and 1 told him he ought to write
all that down while it was fresh in his mind. He did this, and his description of the wreck and what he
experienced follows, in his own words, and it is obvious that it was a terrible experience. Talk about
guardian angels, but there were certainly 3 guardian angels on that train car that Brad, Susanna, and
Julie were on. There really was no other explanation for how they could have gotten out.

In his account of the wreck, which follows, he mentions a cross tie that they were able to hold on to to
keep afloat in the water, but he did not put in his written account something that he told me after he got
home. That cross tie they held on to came floating upstream to them while they were in the water
wondering how they were going to get to shore, and it enabled them to get out alive. Incidentally,
Amtrak insisted, and I am sure it was for the purpose of quieting down possible lawsuits, that Brad
accept a check which was something over $50,000.00. He simply endorsed the check over to his church,
and contributed every dime of the money to the building fund. He said that God did not save him in
order that he could be rich, and I was proud of him for looking at it that way, and giving the money to
his church.

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