In the rear car of the accommodation train there were at the moment of the accident some sixty-five or seventy human beings, seated and standing. They were of both sexes and of all ages; for it was a Saturday evening in August, and many persons had, through the confusion of the trains, been long delayed in their return from the city to their homes at the sea-side. The first intimation the passengers had of the danger impending over them was from the sudden and lurid illumination of the car by the glare from the head-light of the approaching locomotive. One of them who survived the disaster, though grievously injured, described how he was carelessly watching a young man standing in the aisle, laughing and gayly chatting with four young girls, who were seated, when he saw him turn and instantly his face, in the sudden blaze of the head-light, assumed a look of frozen horror which was the single thing in the accident indelibly impressed on the survivor's memory; that look haunted him. The car was crowded to its full capacity, and the colliding locomotive struck it with such force as to bury itself two-thirds of its length in it. At the instant of the crash a panic had seized upon the passengers, and a sort of rush had taken place to the forward end of the car, into which furniture, fixtures and human beings were crushed in a shapeless, indistinguishable mass. Meanwhile the blow had swept away the smoke-stack of the locomotive, and its forward truck had been forced back in some unaccountable way until it rested between its driving wheels and the tender, leaving the entire boiler inside of the passenger car and supported on its rear truck. The valves had been so broken as to admit of the free escape of the scalding steam, while the coals from the fire-box were scattered among the _débris_, and coming in contact with the fluid from the broken car lamps kindled the whole into a rapid blaze. Neither was the fire confined to the last car of the train. It has been mentioned that in the block at Everett a locomotive returning to Salem had found itself stopped just in advance of the accommodation train. At the suggestion of the engine-driver of that train this locomotive had there coupled on to it, and consequently made a part of it at Revere. When the collision took place, therefore, the four cars of which the accommodation train was made up were crushed between the weight of the entire colliding train on one side and that of two locomotives on the other. That they were not wholly demolished was due simply to the fact that the last car yielded to the blow, and permitted the locomotive of the express train fairly to imbed itself in it. As it was, the remaining cars were jammed and shattered, and, though the passengers in them escaped, the oil from the broken lamps ignited, and before the flames could be extinguished the cars were entirely destroyed.