Episode 1 of 2

Head-on Collision

Name: Head-on Collision
Start: 1856-07-17
Location: Between Camp Hill and Fort Washington stations

When: 17 July 1856
Where: Between Camp Hill and Fort Washington stations
Part of: The Great Train Wreck of 1856 near Philadelphia

Two trains collided head-on at 6:18 a.m. between Camp Hill and Fort Washington stations, causing massive casualties.

Engineers failed to detect each other due to continuous whistle blowing. The collision occurred as the trains rounded a curve, resulting in 59-67 deaths and over 100 injuries, making it the world's deadliest rail disaster to date.

Sources

Great Train Wreck of 1856 Wikipedia, revision of 2026-07-30

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.