A Terrible Plane Crash—And Two Stories, 50-Plus Years Apart

by Al Walton

My mother was a schoolteacher.  She was a very “grounded” person, and I mean literally.  For her entire life, she refused to set foot in any type of aircraft.  She was afraid it might crash.  And as it developed, she had good reason to be afraid.

One December day in 1963, the temperature was abnormally warm – very hot and humid, in fact.  Late that evening, a line of strong thunderstorms came through – rain, wind, and LOTS of lightning and thunder.  I was 11 years old; my parents and I were doing our best to watch TV in the living room and to ignore the flashes of lightning every few seconds, and the strong thunderclaps and rumblings that accompanied the lightning.

Suddenly, there was a very loud, deep BOOM, followed almost immediately by a red glow in the night sky.  It seemed that the entire sky was glowing a deep red.  My parents’ old farm had a barn with a steel roof which they recently had painted with aluminum.  That barn roof was now glowing red in the night.  We thought that our farmhouse must have been struck by lightning and was on fire, and that the barn roof was reflecting the glow of that fire. 

My father and I got up and ran through the kitchen and out to the back porch.  Immediately, we saw in the distance, through the barren trees of the December forest to our west, a bright orange streak heading almost straight down from the sky to the earth.  It looked to me like “a pencil of flame.”  The instant the orange streak reached the earth, there were two huge explosions, about a half-second apart.

We phoned the police to report what happened, via the primitive reporting of the era–no 911, rotary phones, party lines, Operator-assisted calling, etc.  Gradually, the TV and radio news outfits began broadcasting the terrible story that a Pan Am airliner had crashed near the base of Red Hill, a small hill about two miles east of Elkton, MD, and barely two miles southwest of my parents’ house.

It almost goes without saying that after that plane crash, any tiny chance that my mom might have been talked into flying somewhere had now been reduced to zero.

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For the next summer, 1964, my mother, who taught learning-disabled children, was offered the opportunity to attend specialized teacher training by a renowned expert in the field.  The problem was that the expert’s school and offices were in Los Angeles, some 3,000 miles away from our Newark, Delaware home.  My mom decided to make the journey by train, round-trip, and she took me along–first-class, in a bedroom.  We were on the PRR’s “General” between Philadelphia and Chicago; and the Union Pacific’s “City of Los Angeles” between Chicago and L.A.  My experiences on that trip are a subject for another story; but suffice to say that transcontinental trip was what caused me to become a railfan.  And it would never have happened if my mother hadn’t been deathly afraid of flying.

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Fast-forward 50-plus years.  I was close to concluding a 45-year railroad career, 43 of those with Amtrak.  At the time, I was working out of CNOC, Amtrak’s Consolidated National Operations Center, located in Wilmington, DE, only a half city block from the Wilmington train station.  One day, having to attend a meeting in Washington DC, I boarded the locomotive of a southbound Amtrak train during its Wilmington stop.  (I had “head-end pass” authority to ride the locomotive of any Amtrak train as part of my duties for company travel.) 

My young locomotive engineer was very professional, and our limited small talk in the engine cab was confined to info about operating the train – until I happened to mention where I lived.  (My road crosses over the NEC at MP 40.8, less than a mile from the Delaware-Maryland state line.)  Out of the blue, as we were speeding down the NEC at 125 miles per hour, my engineer asked me if he knew where, in relation to the railroad, the Pan Am airliner had crashed back in 1963.  Then, out of his grip he pulled a scrapbook containing photos and news articles of that air crash!  At the time, we were just passing the undergrade bridge for Muddy Lane, about a mile into Maryland; and I pointed due (railroad) east of the locomotive and advised him that the crash occurred about two miles east of the railroad at that point. 

I very briefly recounted my youthful experience as a witness to that awful event.  The rest of our trip to Washington Union Station was absolutely routine.  And I never asked or found out why this very competent and otherwise all-business Engineer was so interested in a 50-year-old plane crash, let alone keeping a scrapbook on the subject.

Al Walton retired in 2020 after a 45-year railroad career with Penn Central and Amtrak, as a Tower Operator, Train Dispatcher, and in various management positions.  He lives outside of Newark, Delaware, about a mile from the Maryland state line, in the same farmhouse in which he grew up.