Bob Hodel was driving home from work one cool Wednesday in March when it appeared before him like a ghoulish apparition: a geyser of orange flame, rising from the road we now call Santa Fe Way, directly ahead a mile or so.
Suddenly wide-eyed, he leaned into the gas pedal of his company car — the bright green Volkswagen that brought him to Cal Kern Farm Supply most mornings at 6 and home again, to his parents’ house, at the end of the workday.
Something had collided with a train just ahead to the south, where the BNSF railroad tracks intersected with Hageman Road.
Now a plume of black smoke was rising above the flames, and Hodel, then 24, today 89, knew it would be bad. He arrived before any police or emergency crews.
“I was one of the first ones there,” he said, thinking back to that day in 1960 when the worst train wreck in Bakersfield history pierced a late-winter dusk. “I drove up on it and I came upon the carnage. I couldn't believe that. Like Pick-Up Sticks. The cars were all kind of ways and it was a mess. People were coming out of windows.”
Within seconds, Hodel spotted what he came to regard as his purpose that night.
“When I drove behind the train wreck and got out of my car there were screams and there was a lot of chaos,” Hodel said. “And then I happened to see him under the metal. And he needed the most help, I thought, and so I centered on him.”
His name was Archie, last name long forgotten, a young Black man about Hodel’s age, and he was buried in twisted metal from the waist down.
“I don’t know how he lived,” Hodel said. “He said he was up getting a drink of water at the end of the car when all of a sudden things went crazy. … He was pinned to the ground.”
Hodel jumped back into the green Volkswagen and quickly drove home, grabbed his father’s acetylene welding torch, and hustled back. And for the next several hours, assisted by four or five others, Hodel painstakingly cut away the steel.
“We talked to him for about three hours to keep him going,” Hodel said. “We knew that when we would release the metal that the blood would flow. And so, we had a doctor there. I remember we lifted the metal up that was pressing his thigh down, and it wasn’t pleasant. We got him out of there.”
Hageman Road once cut a straight and direct east-west line through the alfalfa fields and grazing pastures of northwest Bakersfield, including the tiny farm town of Greenacres.
Not anymore — not completely.
Now Hageman has a bump — a curved northerly detour near Allen Road. The road then curves back to the south before resuming its straight course.
The reason for the rerouting: So that Hageman approaches the Santa Fe railroad tracks at a 90-degree angle, rather than the acute, visibility-skewing angle it took at 5:08 p.m. on March 2, 65 years ago this month.
That’s the moment all of Bakersfield shook with the hellish roar of death. The moment a geyser of fire shot 100 feet into the sky. The moment the Santa Fe Railway’s Chicago-bound San Francisco Chief passenger train — flying down the tracks at 75 mph, and perhaps faster — smashed into a big rig pulling two trailers containing 8,000 gallons of highly volatile, freshly refined Kern County fuel oil.
The explosion killed 14 people instantly. Sixty-three others — many of them broken, burned or both — were hospitalized. (Some accounts erroneously reported 17 dead.)
The wreck made the front page of the New York Times and inspired a years-long safety review and infrastructure improvements that we still enjoy today.
The driver of the fuel truck, owned by Oglesby Brothers Petroleum Transportation Co., was 48-year-old John Garrett of Bakersfield. There were no rail-crossing arms at the intersection to warn vehicle traffic, only a reflector-sign on the side of the road. A coroner’s inquest found that the train, a diesel electric, sounded its horn several times, but Garrett proceeded across the tracks anyway at 5 or 6 mph.
The big rig driver may have realized, in his final moments, what was happening, because witnesses told investigators he turned his vehicle so it was almost parallel to the tracks as the thundering Chief bore down — behind schedule, according to a Santa Fe official. So, the train was possibly exceeding the prescribed speed.
The 11-car passenger train might have been going as fast as 90.
We’ll never know what Garrett was thinking because he was immediately incinerated. The explosion of metal against metal sent flaming oil raining down. Eleven of the 83 passengers were killed, along with two Santa Fe employees, engineer Lanson Snyder and fireman A.H. Brawley, both of Fresno. Their charred bodies were found some distance from the front of the train, as if they had tried to scramble away at the last instant.
The train rumbled on for a quarter mile after the crash before it twisted and jerked to an agonizing halt. Some of the cars hung precariously over a 30-foot embankment. The screams of the trapped, injured and dying pierced the steady roar of the flames.
Twenty-two-year-old Earl Blakely, a year out of the Army, had just arrived home from work when his father, Fred Blakely called.
“Said, ‘Earl, we’ve got a bad accident out here,’” Blakely remembers of the phone conversation. “So, I immediately got out here as fast as I could. And we just started working, trying to get people out of the cars."
But Fred Blakely had recently plowed his fields and ambulances arriving on the scene couldn't get traction in the loose dirt to reach train cars containing the injured. The farmers of Rosedale and Greenacres to the rescue.
“It looked like a sea of tractors, coming this way,” Blakely said, simulating the motion of rolling ocean waves with his arms. “And they were going across Allen Road.”
The convoy of farm tractors converged on the crash scene to tow the ambulances into position. As doctors tended to the wounded, tractors scraped and flattened the ground so the ambulances could get out again.
Nineteen-year-old Stephen Preston came upon the same nightmarish scene, pulling up alongside the tracks in his red-and-white 1959 Chevy Impala.
Preston, now 84 and living in Contra Costa County, had just gotten off work at Brock’s Department Store downtown and was driving home. He lived with his parents, in a house directly behind their family-run roadside hamburger joint — Glen’s Drive-In, which occupied the spot on Rosedale Highway where Country Boy Drive-in now stands.
He saw some haunting things that evening.
“The first passenger car was on its side with the floor partially broken open and you could see, pretty sure it was a man, except he was looking like soup cans, and you could see him through this crack,” Preston said. “There were three of us and somebody got an ax so we could break some of that metal away and we pulled him out, but he was dead, deceased.”
The tanker truck, in contrast to the train, sat smoldering almost where it had been struck.
“The truck frame was right down … actually did not go very far,” Preston said. “Parts of it were still burning. It was probably fuel burning off. Unfortunately, the driver was deceased and that was not a pretty sight. All you could see was the framework of the seat and body, which was incinerated."
The eastbound Chief, which left the East Bay city of Richmond, near Oakland, just before noon the morning of the crash, was in pieces. The Santa Fe train’s four diesel engines, two baggage cars and the first three passenger cars had hurtled off the tracks and lay scattered across a pasture, tangled in a grotesque geometric design. The inferno was so hot, the truck’s motor had been fused into the jumbled molten mass of the train engine.
Surviving passengers said they had very little warning. Some felt a slight jar. Others thought they heard a whistle and felt the grinding of brakes. One man said he saw the truck approaching the crossing.
Then, said passenger Lucille Bonette of Kansas City, Mo., “The next thing I knew we were going through a blaze of fire.” That was her section of the train passing through the flames of the wreckage of the more forward cars.
“Most of us,” said 25-year-old Airman First Class Donald Sutherland, “were thrown around like rag dolls.”
All available ambulances sped to the disaster. A call for every doctor and nurse in the area went out. Physicians climbed over and around the wreckage, feeling for pulses. Rescue crews rushed cutting torches to the scene to pull out trapped passengers. Floodlights turned the gathering dark into a false day as dozens, then hundreds, gathered at the site of destruction.
Fred and Flossie Blakely’s 1,000-square foot house was only about 100 yards from the crash scene. With the Blakelys’ permission, rescue workers, Santa Fe officials, law enforcement, media and aid workers moved in.
“As the evening wore on, Salvation Army ladies came on and my mom turned the inside of her house over to them,” Blakely said. “And they did a wonderful job. They made sandwiches until there were no more sandwiches to be made."
The California Highway Patrol set up roadblocks on Rosedale Highway to keep the area clear for emergency vehicles and other important traffic, but residents filtered in anyway, and crowds gathered on both sides of the tracks to watch in wonder. They were held back where necessary by sheriff’s deputies and highway patrol officers.
Cranes explored the tangled mess looking for survivors — almost tenderly, in the words of a reporter for United Press International. One man, badly injured, finally was freed after eight hours.
It could have been worse. Only one of the truck’s two trailers exploded.
“A lot of people were walking around zombie-like. They were in shock, I’m sure. … Some of them were just staring at this thing wondering, ‘Well, what happened?’”
It took a dozen fire companies two hours to finally quench the raging flames, and many more hours for first responders to extract all of the passengers, living and dead.
One man who rushed to the scene said he ran about 300 yards to the nearest passenger car. Children inside were crying. Passengers broke windows and passed the children through, into the arms of those waiting outside to take them.
“The walking wounded (were everywhere),” Preston said. “They brought buses out for the people who were mobile. Some of them were just shaken up. I helped this one old lady. She couldn’t step down from the train, she was in one of the back cars. I helped her down and walked her to the bus. She said, ‘Don’t go too fast. My back hurts.’”
Radio stations put out a call for blood donations for the injured and the city responded with more than 250 pints.
The crash took the life of one of the San Joaquin Valley’s most distinguished medical scientists. Dr. Marshall J. Fiese, director of health services at Fresno State College. He was prominent among those combating valley fever.
Among the widows left behind was Evelyn Snyder. Her first husband, Joseph C. Waugh, a Santa Fe fireman, had been killed in 1922 when, two miles west of Bakersfield, his speeding steam locomotive was violently jarred by a misaligned track switch, and he was fatally scalded by a blast of escaping steam. The widow married another railroad man, engineer Lanson Snyder. He was cremated 38 years later at the controls of the San Francisco Chief — again, west of Bakersfield.
The morning after the crash Fred Blakely found a huge section of severed rail on his property.
“From where that piece of steel came off the rails, it threw it 250 feet through the air,” said his son, Earl.
Santa Fe welders cut up the shattered rail into sections and hammered it into anvils, which they gave away to farmers from around the area who came to help out.
The railroad people left the Blakelys with another souvenir. A melted rail car.
“They left the car intact,” Blakely said. “And they came out here with big excavators, not this modern kind we have now. And they just kept digging until they got it deep enough and wide enough and long enough, they dropped it in there with big cranes and covered it up. That’s a big hole.”
And as far as anyone knows, that melted passenger rail car is still buried somewhere alongside the railroad tracks, in the Santa Fe right-of-way, southeast of Allen and Hageman roads.
Four days after the crash Bob Hodel brought his mother Lydia to Mercy Hospital to visit Archie. Mother Hodel, who inspired so many of the recipes at Hodel’s — the still-popular restaurant Bob Hodel would open seven years later — brought some of her renowned coffee cake. Archie wrote a letter of thanks after he recovered and made it home to Louisiana.
The pages of the Bakersfield Californian were filled with letters of gratitude — both from victims from around the country who’d finally made it home and from locals.
“For Bakersfield, it was an event, it was a real event, and we were able to pitch in and did what we could,” Hodel said.
For Earl Blakely, who, like Hodel, got married just a few weeks later, the whole tragic experience told him something important about his hometown.
“The folks in this whole Rosedale area — it was wonderful,” he said. “I mean, what happened was not wonderful, it was horrible. But people all came together. They were all coming over with tools and so forth that they might never have seen again, but that wasn’t the issue. It was like what you would expect people to do.”
Days after the crash a state legislative committee launched a probe of oil tank truck accidents. Existing laws already required certain vehicles, including school buses and oil tankers, to stop at all rail crossings, regardless of whether a train was known to be approaching. But the legislature wanted to know what more could be done.
Why John Garrett did not stop at the rail crossing was never clear — he had worked for Oglesby Brothers for 10 years and was on his second delivery trip of the day to the Humble Oil Co. storage facility.
Perhaps he was anxious to get home for dinner to his wife and 11-year-old son, and with no crossing arm to stop him, perhaps he daydreamed himself right into the path of the train.
But the cause of the wreck could not be officially determined; the truck driver’s death made it impossible.
Oglesby Brothers was named in 39 of the 40 lawsuits filed by the families of crash victims but the company stayed in business until 1979.
The San Francisco Chief, which started its daily run between Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area in 1954, shut down in 1971, when Amtrak began operations.
Today, a concrete train trestle crosses over Allen Road at Santa Fe Way, near Hageman, where the wreck took place, so the possibility of some kind of repeat incident is virtually nonexistent.
But the general problem persists. Even though the grade crossing collision rate has dropped every year since 1978, many hundreds are killed every year. In 2024, the U.S. saw 2,045 highway-rail grade crossing collisions, resulting in 252 fatalities and 653 injuries.
And the rail industry continues to make a compelling case for highway safety — imploring that we respect the speed, weight and power of trains. They always win these collisions — except, as in cases like the 1960 disaster, everyone loses.