The Great Chatsworth Train Wreck of 1887

Chatsworth is a small town located in Central Illinois. It is 100 miles south of Chicago and 70 miles east of Peoria. It was founded in 1859, two years after the Peoria & Oquawka Railroad first crossed Central Illinois. This railroad became the Toledo, Peoria, and Warsaw line a few years later. In August of 1887, the TP&W railroad began advertising for a special passenger excursion train that would take Central Illinois citizens on a short vacation trip to Niagara Falls.
On August 10, 1887, the train with its 625 total passengers began the trip east across Illinois. Just past midnight, the passenger train encountered a burned out wooden bridge just east of Chatsworth. The second locomotive and several wood passenger cars derailed killing approximately 85 passengers and injuring 372 more. It was one of the worst train wrecks of that era. In 1970, Helen Louise Plaster Stoutemyer published her account of the Chatsworth Train Wreck titled The Train That Never Arrived.
This book utilizes her research and adds a significant amount of new information about the wreck. It is hoped this book will help to inform future generations about the Chatsworth Train Wreck of 1887. The Chatsworth train wreck still ranks as the seventh worst in American railroad history in terms of fatalities.