I picked up these three photos on eBay recently. They depict a collision between and eastbound passenger train pulled by B&MR K-4 No. 64 and a string of loaded stock cars. The fact that there is no evidence of the remains of a waycar among the debris of
the destroyed stock cars hopefully means that switching was underway and there was no waycar on the end of an eastbound freight and thus no train crew members killed or injured. Note that there is very little damage to the 64 and that neither it nor any of
the cars of the passenger train are derailed. B&MR 64 was turned out by the Havelock shops in May 1902 and was renumbered CB&Q 717 at Alliance in December 1904, so the photos were taken between those dates. And the fact that the renumbering took place at
Alliance is an indicator that the Ten-Wheeler was assigned there, thus likely making the passenger train No. 42, the
Portland-St. Louis Special, which in May 1902 departed Alliance at 12:40 a.m., arriving in Lincoln at 1:00 p.m. In the early years of the 20th century trains 41-42 did carry a full 60-foot RPO, such as seen in the photos, for the Lincoln & Billings
RPO route. If these suppositions are correct, the accident likely would have taken place somewhere in western or central Nebraska, between Edgemont, S.D., and Ravenna, Neb. Kind of a challenge, but not an insurmountable one usually, to take unidentified
images such as these and try to determine when and where they were taken.
Hol
P.S. -- I'm sending the third photo separately, as together the three images exceed Yahoo's 10 MB limit.