WRECK KILLS 21; 50 ARE INJURED

New Haven Train Crashes Into Rear of Waiting Express.

WOODEN COACHES CRUSHED

Miss MARGARET ARMSTRONG, of This City, Among Dead.

OFFICIALS BLAME SIGNALS

Admit They Were Twice Ordered to Change System – Fog Obstructed View of Engineer of Second Train – Heard Torpedoes, but Did Not Have Time to Stop Big Engine – Victims Hurled From Berths Over Fence Fifty Feet Distant – Coroner Begins Secret Inquiry and Road Burns Wreckage in Defiance of Commerce Commission’s Orders – Noted Philadelphians Dead.

New Haven, Conn., Sept. 2. – Twenty-one persons were killed and nearly 50 injured, some of whom may die, in a rear-end collision shortly before 7 o’clock this morning on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, 6 miles north of here.

Danger Signal Passed.
The first section of the White Mountain Express, bound for New York, speeding along at probably 40 miles an hour in a thick fog, rushed by a danger signal, it is said, and crashed into the rear of the second section of the Bar Harbor Express, standing 100 feet beyond the signal block.

Plows Through Cars.
The White Mountain engine cleaved through the two rear Pullman cars, both of wood, splitting them in two, and tossing their wreckage and threescore of mangled human beings, some alive, some dead, on either side of the track.

Hurled From Track.
The third car, also of wood, and occupied by 40 boys on their way from a summer camp in Monmouth, Me., was lifted into the air and almost completely off the track. The car fell on its side, crumpled up, crushed two of the boys to death, and injured several others.

Bodies Thrown Over Fence.
Some of the victims of the two rear Pullmans were hurled from their berths over a fence paralleling the track fifty feet distant, mattresses, bedding, and clothing found lodgement in the telegraph wires.

It was the third serious wreck which the New Haven has suffered within a year and inaugurated the first day of the regime of Howard Elliott, the newly elected head of the road. Mr. Elliott, returning from his summer home in New Hampshire to assume his duties, passed over the scene of the wreck on an earlier train, less than an hour before.

Practically all the passengers on both trains were returning home from summer vacations, and all but two of a camping party of nine guests of S. Crozer Fox of Elkins Park, Pa., returning from Maine, were wiped out. Fox was among those killed. No one was hurt in the White Mountain train.