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Deadliest Amtrak crash almost 30 years ago when train plunged into river, caught fire

Amtrak’s worst wreck in terms of deaths was the Sept. 22, 1993, derailment outside Mobile, Alabama, when the Sunset Limited plunged off a bridge and caught fire in the pre-dawn hours.

Forty-seven passengers and crew were killed and 103 injured in what became known as the Big Bayou Canot rail accident. The bridge over that arm of the Mobile River had been damaged by a barge shortly before the passenger train started to cross it..

The worst wreck as far as overall casualties was the 1990 collision of an Amtrak train with a Boston commuter train that left 453 injured, but there were no fatalities.

There is no record of an Amtrak wreck in Missouri having 20 casualties or more, according to Wikipedia’s list of serious accidents.

Prior to Monday’s wreck, in which at least 50 were reported injured along with multiple deaths, the Southwest Chief and its predecessor, the Southwest Limited, had been involved in three serious wrecks along its 2,265-mile route from Los Angeles to Chicago that met that 20-casualty threshold.

The most recent was on March 13, 2016, near Cimarron, Kansas, when the train derailed from track that had been damaged by a runaway truck loaded with cattle earlier in the day, but which had gone undetected.

The last four cars out of the 10 pulled by two locomotives fell on their sides and two derailed upright, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Twenty-eight out of the 144 passengers and Amtrak employees on board were injured, two critically, but no deaths were reported.

In 1997, 183 people were injured, none killed, when the Southwest Chief derailed due to a damaged bridge in Kingman, Arizona.

Before it was re-branded, Southwest Limited derailed on a curve near Lawrence, Kansas, on Oct. 2, 1979, while clocked at 78 mph as it entered a zone where the limit was 30 mph, according to news reports at the time.

Two crew members died in the wreck and 69 passengers and crew were injured.