He was a train engineer for the Illinois Central. He was from Cayce, Kentucky, hence the nickname "Casey." He prided himself on keeping his train on schedule or, in trainman's vernacular, "getting her there on the advertised" and never "falling down" (arriving late). Some say he had a tendency to take chances to meet that goal, but he was talented, and his peers considered him one of the best in the business.
Jones had a special train whistle. Its unique sound involved a long-drawn-out note that began softly, rose and then died away to a whisper, a sound which became his trademark. Some described its sound as "a sort of whippoorwill call," and people asleep in their beds along his route would hear it as he went by late at night and wake momentarily, saying, "There goes Casey Jones.”
On the night of April 29, 1900, he had just completed a run from Canton, Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee and would normally have laid over in Memphis. But the regular engineer who would have had the Memphis-to-Canton run called in sick, and so Jones was assigned the run (nicknamed "the Cannonball Express"). The weather was rainy and foggy, and the Memphis-to-Canton run was known for tricky curves. The change in engineers delayed the start of the run by 95 minutes, and although the run would normally take 4 hours and 50 minutes, Jones was determined to make up the 95-minute delay and "get her there on the advertised." The train left the station at 12:50 a.m., April 30.
He almost made up the entire 95-minute delay. By the time he was 155 miles into the 188-mile run, he was almost on time and was feeling chipper. He told his fireman,"the old girl's got her dancing slippers on tonight!" By the time he reached Vaughn, Mississippi, he was only two minutes behind.
But ahead around a bend there were two freight trains stopped on a side track with several cars extending out onto the main line. They were preparing to perform a maneuver called a "saw-by" to allow the Cannonball Express to pass, when an air hose broke and immobilized one of the freight trains, leaving the cars on the main line. Jones' fireman was in a position to spot the trouble first and yelled, "Oh my Lord, there's something on the main line!" Jones yelled to the fireman to jump. The fireman jumped from the speeding train and was knocked unconscious, but Jones stayed at the controls to try to reduce the train's speed. He reversed the throttle, applied the emergency air brakes, and succeeded in reducing speed from about 75 miles an hour to 35 before the train plowed into a wooden caboose, a car load of hay, a car full of corn and half way through a car of timber before leaving the track. Jones died in the crash, but none of his passengers were seriously injured, nor was the fireman who had jumped from the train. It's pretty clear that Jones' decision to stay on the train and do what he could to slow it down saved the lives of the passengers.
An African-American engine-wiper for the Illinois Central, Wallace Saunders, was a friend of Jones and composed a ballad about him that caught on and has been recorded many times in various versions. The poet Carl Sandburg called "Casey Jones, the Brave Engineer" the "greatest ballad ever written." For his part, Wallace Saunders called Carl Sandburg "the greatest poet in the history of the world." (Just kidding.)
The Grateful Dead recorded the ballad but also did a spin-off entitled simply "Casey Jones." It's a lot more catchy to my ear than the ballad, but it also defames poor Casey with these lines:
Driving that train
High on cocaine
Casey Jones, you better
Watch your speed.
Jones was a teetotaler and devoted family man, and there is no evidence that he used cocaine. That's just The Grateful Dead being The Grateful Dead. The posthumous warning to "watch your speed," however, probably has some merit.
For years after the train crash that killed Jones, corn grew wild at the site--generations descended from the load of corn that was scattered from the freight train when the locomotive plowed into it.
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| John Luther "Casey" Jones March 14, 1863--April 30, 1900 |
