History's A Disaster
Bloody history and bloodier crimes. Andrew takes a weekly look at all things bloody. From natural disasters to man made atrocities
History's A Disaster
The Malbone Street Wreck
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A packed train, a brand-new tunnel, and a curve that demanded six miles per hour. Now add a labor strike, a rushed staffing decision, and an operator who never should have been put in that seat. That mix created the 1918 Malbone Street Wreck, still the deadliest subway crash in New York City history, and we walk through exactly how it happened.
We start with how Brooklyn’s transit system grew from a messy web of private lines into the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, then sprinted into expansion under the 1913 Dual Contracts. Near Prospect Park, engineers opened a new connection under Malbone Street with an S-shaped reverse curve and a steep approach, a design that left almost no room for error. When the strike hit on November 1, BRT leadership chose revenue and rush-hour service over training and caution, putting Antonio Edward Luciano at the controls with only hours of instruction and no familiarity with the Brighton Beach Line.
From there, the story tightens: missed stops, mounting time pressure, a downhill run into the tunnel, and a train entering the curve at more than five times the safe speed. We also look at the grim rescue challenges underground, the Spanish flu’s strain on hospitals that forced improvisation at Ebbets Field, and the courtroom battles that generated anger, settlements, and surprisingly little clarity. Finally, we connect the wreck to lasting subway safety reforms, including better controls and automatic enforcement systems that admit a hard truth: human judgment alone is not enough.
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Special thank you to Lunarfall Audio for producing and doing all the heavy lifting on audio editing since April 13, 2025, the Murder of Christopher Meyer episode https://lunarfallaudio.com/
Train Anxiety And A Deadly Curve
SPEAKER_00Okay, I'll admit it, it's been a long time since I've traveled by train. And I've never been on a subway. Not sure if I really want to though either. Maybe once, but not really my idea of a good time. Not really claustrophobic, but the thought of speeding through a narrow concrete tunnel just inches away from certain death is not exactly my idea of fun. It's probably a little bit safer nowadays, what since train cars are made out of metal compared to a hundred years ago when they were made out of, you know, flimsy wood. Wood rail cars don't stand up well against concrete. Like in 1918 when a subway train in New York derailed and smashed into the wall, killing 93 passengers. So, what happened?
Why Malbone Street Still Matters
SPEAKER_00I'm Andrew, and this is History's A Disaster. Tonight we're diving into the Malbone Street Rack, the deadliest train crash in New York City history.
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EMT Update And Real World Stakes
SPEAKER_00And before we get into tonight's episode, I just wanted to give you guys a little update. About a month ago, I mentioned that I was in an accelerated EMT class and that I might have to miss an episode or two, which did not happen. And since then I have not mentioned the class since. So, give you a little update. Since that time, I have passed the class and recently passed my state exam, meaning in the state of North Carolina, I am now officially a certified emergency medical technician at the basic level. With all that done, now I just need to prep to take the national registry and find a local EMS agency to hire
How Brooklyn Built Rapid Transit
SPEAKER_00me. Brooklyn, in the late 1800s, was its own independent city, which I did not know before this, and getting around it meant dealing with a shit ton of horse car lines, cable railways, and elevated steam trains, each run by a different company with its own fares, its own schedules, and often its own gauge of track. The Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company was formed in 1896 by buying up and merging a dozen or more of these smaller operators, like the Brooklyn Elevated Railroad, the Brooklyn Heights Railroad, the Coney Island and Brooklyn Railroad, along with several others, into a single company that could run trolleys, elevated trains, and eventually subway lines under one company. It electrified the old elevated lines, which had originally run on steam locomotives, and by the early 20th century, it operated one of the largest streetcar and elevated networks in the United States. The company's ambitions grew alongside the city it served. After Brooklyn was absorbed into the five boroughs of Greater New York in 1898, and especially after the success of the Interborough Rapid Transit's first subway line in Manhattan in 1904, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company angled to become a full partner in the city's rapid transit future. Their opportunity would finally arrive with the dual contracts of 1913, which was an arrangement between the City of New York and its two private transit operators, the Interborough Rapid Transit and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit, to jointly finance a massive expansion of the subway system. Under the dual contracts, the BRT built new subway lines, extended and rebuilt its elevated lines, and connected them into a unified system stretching across Brooklyn and into Manhattan. By the time the war in Europe was consuming headlines in 1918, the BRT was in the middle of one of the most complex construction projects in its history, rebuilding the junction where its Brighton beach line met the rest of the system near Prospect Park.
The Malbone Curve Engineered For Failure
SPEAKER_00On September 25th, 1918, a brand new tunnel opened beneath the intersection of Flatbush Avenue, Ocean Avenue, and a modest residential street called Melbone Street. The tunnel was built to carry Brighton line trains, which had previously run along a straighter route through Prospect Park Station, around a new connection under construction for the BRT's expanding subway network. To make that connection work, engineers had laid the new track through a tight reverse curve, which is an S-shaped bend that required trains to swing first one way and then the other in quick succession. It was designed for a maximum read at maximum safe speed of six miles per hour. Trains coming the other direction still use the old straighter tunnel. Only the southbound Coney Island bound trains entering from Consumers Park, which is now the Botanic Gardens station and descending a 70 foot grade toward Prospect Park had to thread this new needle. And that just sounds stupid as fuck. Let's make a tight ass turn right after descending as steep as
Strike Day Decisions That Went Wrong
SPEAKER_00fuck hill. By the fall of nineteen eighteen, the PRT, like most of American industry, was operating under wartime pressure. Men were off fighting the war, so labor was scarce, inflation was eating into wages, and transit workers across the country were increasingly organized and increasingly pissed off. We've touched upon this a couple times in other episodes. On the morning of November 1st, motormen belonging to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers said fuck this shit and walked off the job. They were striking over the company's firing of 29 union members, on top of a longstanding dispute over recognition and organizing rights. And of course, the shitheads running the BRT decided not to let a little thing like a strike shut down rush hour service for hundreds of thousands of Brooklyn commuters. You know, because they can't afford to lose all that money because of it. So they decided they would keep the trains running using whatever personnel it could scrape together. Didn't matter who they were or how well they knew the job. They just needed warm bodies at the controls. Besides, it's a train. It only goes in one direction. How fucking hard could that be,
An Untrained Motorman Takes The Controls
SPEAKER_00right? With that thought in mind, they made one of the worst possible choices when they put Antonio Edward Luciano, a twenty five year old crew dispatcher, in charge of running a train. He had never worked as a motorman in passenger service. His only experience at the controls of a train was shunting empty cards around a rail yard more than a year before. He also had no familiarity whatsoever with the Brighton Beach line, its stations, its grades, or its brand new, unforgiving bitch of a curve beneath Malbone Street. The company's normal training regimen for a certified motorman was roughly 90 hours of classroom instruction and supervised operation. Old Luciano here, who, I'm gonna stress I don't blame a single bit, received less than three hours of classroom instruction and was never formally certified. He was simply told, here's the train, get to it. On top of the shitty training he received, he was also dealing with quite a few personal tragedies. His infant daughter had died in the Spanish flu epidemic, which I covered in an earlier episode if you haven't listened to it, which was then sweeping the country, and her funeral had been held only three days before the strike began. So not a lot of time to grieve. I think I would be absolutely wrecked three days after my infant child dying. Luciano himself was also recovering from a bout of the same flu. So it was in other words, grieving, exhausted, and thoroughly unprepared, and the BRT put him at the controls of a loaded passenger train anyways. So once again, another train company is setting up an engineer, or in this case a motorman, for failure because of way too inadequate training. Oh, and also adding to this, they fucked up the way the train was organized. Their elevated trains typically alternated heavy powered motor cars with lighter top heavy unpowered trailer cars. That way a motor car's weight and lower center of gravity would help stabilize any of the lighter trailers coupled next to it. Standard practice was never to couple two lighter cars together. However, the train assigned Luciano that evening had been made up in violation of that practice. Two trailer cars, numbered eighty and one hundred, were coupled directly to one another in the middle of the train, which meant that the two lightest and most vulnerable cars in the train were exactly the ones positioned to take the worst of what was about to come.
Small Mistakes Build Quiet Pressure
SPEAKER_00That evening, the train left Park Row in Lower Manhattan, crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, and began working its way south and east through Brooklyn toward Coney Island. On board was roughly six hundred and fifty passengers heading home from a long week of work. On board were clerks, an assistant school principal, engineers, and ordinary commuters with no idea that the man driving their train had three hours of training and a funeral just three days behind him. And from the start, poor Luciano struggled. He had trouble judging his speed and his stopping points, repeatedly overshooting station platforms as the train made its way down the line. And each time he overshot, it cost time. Each lost minute seemed to have built a quiet pressure to make that time up. That pressure met its worst possible circumstance at Consumers Park Station. Luciano ran the train past the platform without stopping, bypassing a station where he should have slowed and more importantly where the ordinary rhythm of approach and braking would have taken some of the speed off the train before hitting that 70 foot descent into the tunnel portal beneath Malbone Street, followed almost immediately by the sharp reverse curve rated for only six miles per hour. Investigators later concluded that Luciano never engaged the emergency brake and never attempted to reverse the train's motors. The two most effective tools available to anyone trying to check a runaway train. Surviving passengers described no perceptible scrolling at all as the train came down the grade and into the curve. One of the passengers, a lawyer named Charles Darling, had grown so alarmed by the train speed in the moments before the tunnel that he dropped to the floor of his car and braced himself seconds before the crash.
The Runaway Descent Into Disaster
SPEAKER_00The train hit the reverse curve at over thirty miles an hour, five times higher than the speed limit. At six hundred forty two, the rear wheels of the first car derailed. The two cars immediately behind it, numbers eighty and one hundred that should have never been coupled together, came completely off the rails. Their left hand sides and roofs were torn away as they were ground against the tunnel's concrete center wall, the partition that separated the northbound and southbound tracks. The first and fourth cars in the train sustained relatively minor damage. The fifth car at the very rear was untouched, but the second and third cars, the two trailers, were completely destroyed. Nearly everyone riding in the first of the two cars was killed outright, and most of the passengers in the second car were killed or gravely injured. Luciano in the lead car was unhurt and quickly got the fuck out of there.
Rescue In A Tunnel During Flu
SPEAKER_00The wreck had occurred in a narrow, freshly built tunnel underground and hard to reach, and the wooden wreckage was a darkened tangle of splittered wood, twisted steel and broken glass with iron beams jutting out like bayonets. Which made rescue work agonizingly slow. It took roughly forty five minutes before rescuers were able to fully descend into the wreckage site. Thousands of Brooklyn residents living nearby heard the impact and the cries of the injured within moments. And while station employees, police, and firefighters scrambled to respond, they found themselves competing with an even faster arriving crowd of civilian bystanders, who the police struggled to hold back even as more of them streamed in from the stalled trains up and down the line. New York hospitals, meanwhile, were already strained past their normal capacity by the Spanish flu pandemic, which was still killing New Yorkers by the hundreds that autumn. With the nearest hospital unable to absorb a mass casualty incident on top of its flu wards, authorities improvised they turned Ebbett's Field, the Brooklyn Dodgers ballpark just blocks away, into a makeshift emergency infirmary, laying out the injured and the dead on the field where baseball had been played only weeks before. By eleven o'clock that night, rescuers had recovered eighty five bodies, with counting continuing through the following days as more victims were identified in the wreckage. By the time the last body was pulled out, they had over ninety dead, with hundreds severely injured, which made the Malbone Street Wreck the deadliest single accident in the history of the New York City subway system, something that it still holds today.
Blame Trials And Settlements
SPEAKER_00The public response was quick, and they were pissed. Major John F. Highland, no friend of the private transit companies to begin with, laid the blame squarely on the BRT and pushed for Luciano and several company officials to be tried for manslaughter. The Brooklyn District Attorney, Harry E. Lewis, opened his own investigation in parallel. Feelings in Brooklyn ran hot enough that when BRT officials saw the change of venue for the coming trial, members of a victim's advocacy group were reported and later denied to have shouted for the defendants to be shot. And really can you blame them? The court ultimately granted the venue change anyways, moving the proceedings out to Miniola in Nassau County on the theory that Brooklyn was too inflamed to offer BRT's executives a fair hearing. When the trial finally opened in march nineteen nineteen, fourteen months after the rack, it produced less clarity than anyone might have hoped for, because the same proceedings had to defend both Luciano and the company officials simultaneously. The defense's strategy tangled the two cases together in a way that left the actual mechanics of the crash oddly unexamined. Luciano testified that he had been in control of the train, but that it simply failed to respond to his efforts to slow it. A claim that ran directly against the BRT's own post-crass inspection of the train's equipment, which found the brakes in good working order and showed absolutely no evidence that Luciano had ever placed them in emergency application or attempted to reverse the motors. Because the defense leaned so heavily on disputing the mechanical explanation, other arguably more damning threads like Luciano's exhaustion, his unfamiliarity with the route, his documented struggle to judge his speed and stops earlier in the same run were never fully brought up in court. The court battle would drag on for years. In may nineteen nineteen, the BRT settled with the widows of two victims, and further settlements to dozens of claimants followed that October. By december nineteen nineteen, the courts had approved a further one point two million in damages to victims' families. But the criminal case against Luciano and the company officials collapsed piece by piece. By nineteen twenty one, every defendant had either been acquitted or had the charges against them dropped outright. One BRT vice president, John J. Dempsey, came closest to a conviction with a jury deadlocked seven to five in favor of guilt. But prosecutors chose not to retry him and the case quietly died. As much as I would love to see company executives held accountable for their actions, if it meant taking Luciano down with them, is it really worth it? I really don't blame him at all. Ah, he was put in a shitty situation by shitheads that he never should have
Bankruptcy And A Company Reborn
SPEAKER_00been in. But financially, the wreck proved even more devastating to the company than the criminal trials. By March 1921, the company's accumulated liability from wreck related claims climbed to roughly $75 million. And the company found itself without the funds to pay any of it. It slid into receivership shortly afterward. When it finally emerged from that receivership in early 1923, it did so as a different company altogether, the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit Corporation, or BMT, which inherited responsibility for settling the BRT's outstanding claims from the wreck. The largest single settlement, forty thousand dollars, went to the widow of Floyd G Ten Brock, a forty seven year old engineer who had designed power plants and paper mills, and adjusted for inflation that sum would be roughly three quarters of a million dollars today. Following the wreck, two of the three motor cars and the least damaged trailer were repaired and put back to service. Can't let a good car go to waste. The two destroyed trailer cars, eighty and one hundred were scrapped, car eighty was cut apart right at the wreck site during the cleanup, it was so badly fucked up. The tunnel itself, after being inspected by engineers checking for construction flaws in the curve, was patched up and returned to daily passenger service, where it would remain in continuous use for the next forty years, eventually becoming part of the Franklin Avenue shuttle line that still runs through it today. Though the original curve no longer used in regular passenger operations.
Safety Reforms That Changed Subways
SPEAKER_00And inevitably after as is always the case after a crash, reforms would come. The BRT began phasing wooden rolling stock out of its tunnel and subway operations. Although some wooden body cars would linger in elevated service for decades, cars of partially wooden construction remained in use on elevated lines until 1969. Speedometers, headlights, and improved dead man's controls designed to automatically halt the train if the motorman lost consciousness or well let go of the controls were installed system wide. Along with mechanical trippers, track side devices designed to force an automatic stop if a train ran too fast for the block ahead of it, regardless of what the motorman did or didn't do. It was basically an admission that the system could no longer rely entirely on a single human being's judgment, especially not one handed a train with three hours of training and a grieving heart. Yeah, no shit. Edward, for his part, disappeared into a quieter life. He changed his name, moved to Queen's Village, and became a house builder, and eventually retired to Tucson, Arizona, where he died in nineteen eighty five at the age of ninety one, sixty seven years after the worst thirty seconds of his life.
Memory Renaming And A Late Plaque
SPEAKER_00The street above couldn't survive what had happened on it. Barely a month after the wreck in early December nineteen eighteen, Brooklyn's Board of Aldermen voted to strip the name Malbone Street for most of the road and renamed it Empire Boulevard, a name it carries to this day. Only a single detached block in Crown Heights still bears the original name, a small holdout against a century of trying to forget that shit. It would be another hundred years before the city formally marked what happened there. In november twenty nineteen, on the crash's one hundred and first anniversary, transit officials installed a permanent bronze plaque at the Prospect Park Station and codenamed the corner of Empire Boulevard and Flatbush Avenue Melbone Centennial Way, finally giving the disaster a fixed place in the city's memory to match the one it had long occupied unmarked deep in the tunnel below. And that was the Melbone Street
Closing Thoughts And Listener Requests
SPEAKER_00Rock. Thanks for listening, and if you like the show, please consider leaving a rating or review on your Apple Joyce. And you can reach out to the show at histories of Disaster at gmail.com with questions, comments, or suggestions. As well as following the show on social media like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, whatever. Maybe one day I'll eventually post some good shit on there. And share the episode. Your friends will love it. Their friends will love it. Hell their penguin friends will love it. Speaking of penguins, don't forget, hug your penguin today. And don't take them fast in any curves. You know, while you're chasing that dream, living for today, because tomorrow is never guaranteed. Thanks and goodbye.