A look back at San Antonio’s gruesome 1912 train explosion

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It’s the stuff of legend. A labor strike, a train, a catastrophic explosion that left a slaughter.

Today’s east side of San Antonio witnessed the gruesome scene of an unprecedented train explosion, still shrouded in questions.

It was five minutes to 9 a.m. and rail workers were preparing the train to get the locomotive running after it was repaired due to an accident it was involved in months earlier, the archives say.

Farrell L. Tucker wrote, “The Great Locomotive Explosion: A Socio-Historical Examination of a Tragedy,” available on the UTSA College of Liberal and Fine Arts website. In it he explains that the first test of the boiler was aborted after pressure valves showed a problem. It was then re-ignited to repressurize the boiler. The pressure became too great and the machine, which weighed several tons, was shot down from its position, leaving the rest of the train, buildings nearby, and life in the vicinity of the explosion in tatters.

Body parts and tons of steel wreckage were blown up after the No. 704 passenger locomotive burned outside the Southern Pacific Railroad depots on the 1200 block of North Hackberry Street on March 18, 1912, according to the San Antonio Light Archives. It was a train that served Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio.

At least 26 were killed and nearly 40 were injured. The property damage was given as 200,000 US dollars.

Front page of the San Antonio Light the day after the explosion.

San Antonio Express News

No official reason for the explosion was disclosed, according to a 2012 San Antonio Express News story. Reason and suspicion are different. There were rumors that the explosion was sabotage over labor problems.

With little left of the train after the explosion, investigators had next to nothing to inspect. Tucker suspects that the explosion was the cause of the double boiling.

“The type of explosion that occurred was typical of what happens when a kettle is heated with little or no water and then suddenly water is poured into the kettle,” he writes.

According to newspaper archives published the next day, the tons of machines that were blown up ended up up to seven blocks away on the property of a woman named Mrs. BS Gillis on the corner of Mason Street and Austin Street. Gillis was seriously injured. Another woman, August Peters, was knocked unconscious by the explosion while standing in her garden near the crime scene.

Most of those killed were railroad workers. Tucker writes that the exact number of casualties is never known because the remains were unrecognizable and a sizable portion of the workers were strike breakers, new hires hired by Southern Pacific during the labor strikes.

Local headlines called it an “explosion without parallel” for the railroad and featured a gruesome scene in which corpses were found “mangled beyond recognition.”

Consequences of the train explosion on March 18, 1912 in San Antonio.

Consequences of the train explosion on March 18, 1912 in San Antonio.

Public domain

The news reached the rest of the city and attracted thousands of curious people. The local tram line was preparing to carry a crowd of 50,000 people. The “special police” deployed by the railway company were instructed to keep everyone, including journalists, away from the crime scene. Two San Antonio Express News photographers were “roughly” treated by the guards, according to Tucker.

As the guards were set up to imprison the viewers, the news hit the front pages of newspapers across the country, including the Los Angeles Times and Nashville Tennessean.

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