I have heard a story about a kid putting his head between the diaphragms on a sharp corner, then being either injured or killed when the train straightened out. I can't find anything to corroborate that story and I'm hoping it never happened. Has anybody ever heard anything like that?

I should note that I originally heard it happened at the Heber Valley Railroad sometime in the 80s, but a search of newspapers doesn't turn up anything.

The canvas diaphragms on pre-Amtrak cars have metal facing plates and are pressed together by springs.

This may affect the credibility of your rumor.

Phil Mulligan

That happened circa 1973 or '74 at the old Heber Creeper. There was a section of track in Provo Canyon where the hillside was slipping, causing the track to heave. Trains were still able to operate under a slow order.

As it was told to me, they didn't have safety curtains inside of the diaphragms on the Harriman coaches they ran at the time. The kid was said to be out of control, running back and forth, and his parents were warned several times that they needed to rein him in, to no effect.

The train got to the hump, the kid stuck his head between the diaphragms, and was decapitated. The train crew had to uncouple the cars to free his body.

Reminds me of the Penn Central/Early Amtrak years when Northbound trains would exit the sharp curve at the North Ave. portal of the B&P tunnel in Baltimore. The diaphragms would slide over so much on the curve exiting the tunnel there was plenty of daylight and i often wondered if anyone had been stupid enough to put a arm or head thru the opening. I have no idea what its like now since i haven't been thru it since 1999.

You'd think this would be something we'd all heard of long before now. Most cautionary tales on tourist RRs are very well known.
I'm not calling BS on this, but I wouldn't bet a lot of money that it'd actually happened.

It's not surprising that an accident like this would have gotten sparse coverage in the pre-internet days. It's hardly unusual for ANY "industry" or collective interest to downplay or even ignore an incident that would cast bad publicity on its existence, and we didn't have self-labeled "journalists" (read: any idiot with a cell phone) eager to whore for attention by hyping or exaggerating "extreme danger to the public!!!!!!" in search of views ad followers.

I know nothing of the alleged Heber Creeper incident, but I do remember reading in the UK rail enthusiast press of an incident in 1989 or 1990 on (I believe) the North Wales Coast Line where a rider on one of the frequent mainline steam specials to Holyhead ignored repeated warnings not to lean out the window of the carriage vestibule door, and was fatally struck in the head by an outcropping of rock on a curve in one of the numerous tunnels on the route.

The general reaction at the time was subdued--the man's name was not reported (I vaguely seem to remember he may have been a German enthusiast); and the general air of the coverage was along the lines of "what an idiot..." BUT by September 1991 stout bars sprouted across the vestibule windows of the older rolling stock assigned regularly to mainline steam specials, owned by the Steam Locomotive Operators Association, Flying Scotsman Services, etc., which dramatically reduced (but, as I can personally attest, did not eliminate) the ability of a would-be photographer to get a camera outside the carriage......

I'm sure if we feel like discussing this in a preventative fashion, we can come up with examples of "dangerous" curves on some lines. Cass has some notorious ones, but I believe the operating rolling stock used now was built factoring in these curves. I know of one Western excursion line that has one extreme curve where I believe crew members see to it that no one is passing between the passenger cars where vestibule rubbing/pinching could be an issue, and another where I have attempted to charter a rare-mileage trip over part of the line they don't normally operate on and was refused specifically because they refused to take a passenger train over a couple sharp "horseshoe" curves because of not only the pinching danger, but potential car damage. (The cars supposedly had to come in separated by idler cars.)

I've checked through my Newspapers.com subscription and found nothing of any death at Heber Creeper.

Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence.

This presumes that such an accident MADE IT INTO the newspapers.

OR that any newspaper that would have reported such a story back then is now listed on/with Newspapers.com.

I have been, personally, on both the newspaper side and the research side of this equation since my early teens. Newspapers in smaller, rural, more conservative areas (reminder: we're talking Mormon Utah here) tended, and still tend to some extent, to "respect privacy" of victims of accidents and crime. Currently, there is a lot of flack in rural media in the Southwest as the increasing crisis-level epidemic of opioid and fentanyl deaths from overdoses goes unreported or under-reported in the news, except in vague "big picture" features that downplay individual impacts and de-personalizes the story into the classic "drugs are bad, just say no" lectures of Nancy Reagan.

I'm not claiming that such an accident happened at Heber Creeper/Valley. I'm just observing that "you can't prove a negative."

I can assure you that it did happen. I recall hearing about it at the time, and also from several old heads after I started there in1978.

And I recall it also. I was out there in either '73 or '74 and they were using some strange plywood boxes with an open top, like a cattle chute, set across between cars. I asked why, and was told the exact same story.

I can support Kelly that it really happened. I worked in Heber the summers of '74 and '76. It was before '74. In Provo Canyon is a place called The Hump. The Hump is where the rail road crosses the Wasatch geological fault line. The rails grow upward 3-4 inches every year. I am pretty sure that Bob Hatfield was the conductor that day. I knew at least a half a dozen people that worked that train. The track would raise about 2 feet, the diaphragms on the coaches would separate about 8 to 12 inches. The train crawled over The Hump as you would expect. The kid.... well, you know. They dumped the air within half a car length and backed up to the hump. Left the body in the concession car until they got back to Heber. (As the track was on the other side of the river from the road and before cell phones.)
The summer of '76 I was escort to Jim Ozment, the Chief Engineer of D&RGW, who would come up once a year to Heber for a courtesy track inspection. He was intimately familiar with the Heber Branch as he was responsible for it before abandonment. He said that The Hump would grow perpetually. About every 10 years since it was built the Grande would go in and scrape it flat. It just was flattened again in the last few years I was told.

Attached is a photo of Jim Ozment from the book about the Thistle Landslide. (Which he was a major player in.)

Southern Appalachian Railway Museum had a tight curve on their line that would cause the diaphragms to slide over where you could get your hand or other body parts removed. Whenever the train went around that curve, a crewman was posted to prevent people from walking through the vestibules.

Holy cow, that is morbid. I doubt something like this is possible by today's standards, but I don't think I'll ever be able to look at car diaphragms the same way after reading this...

Good point. I'm pretty sure an insurance carrier would cancel right on the spot if something like that happened today for a tourist railroad. No way the parent's wouldn't sure the heck out of your group.

Unfortunately it is true; it happened in September 1971. I'd heard about the accident during the time that I worked at the Heber Valley in the 1990s. I was finally able to verify the story many years later. This article is from the Salt Lake Tribune, 19 Sept 1971. I was told by more than one person that the accident resulted in a decapitation, but that is not mentioned in any of the newspaper accounts.