October 22, 1895: At 4:00 PM local time -- 10:00 AM on the American East Coast -- the Granville-to-Paris Express train overruns the buffer stop at Gare Montparnasse, a rail terminal in the 15th Arrondissement of Paris. Its driver is trying to make up for lost time, and he comes in too fast, and his air brake fails. The train crosses the station concourse, and crashes through the 2-foot-thick station wall, falling onto the Place de Rennes below.
At least 4 photographs of the Montparnasse Derailment are known to exist, and have become legendary, for the improbability of a locomotive crashing out of a building onto a street.
Incredibly, only 1 person died as a result of the accident, a woman on the street below, named Marie-Augustine Aguilard, not from the train itself, but from masonry falling from the station's facade. The driver, whose name was not publicly revealed, did not go to prison, or even lose his job. His only punishment was a fine of 50 francs.
The old Gare Montparnasse
The station opened in 1840, was rebuilt in 1852, and relocated in 1969 to a new station just south of the original location, where subsequently the prominent Montparnasse Tower was constructed. Completed in 1973, at 689 feet it was the tallest building in France -- as opposed to the 1,063-foot Eiffel Tower, the country's tallest structure -- until 2011, when the Tour First reached 758 feet.
The new Gare Montparnasse.
If you're getting a vibe like New York's Penn Station,
from the old one to the new, I don't blame you.
The station serves intercity TGV trains to the west and southwest of France, including Tours, Bordeaux, Rennes and Nantes, and suburban and regional services on the Transilien Paris-Montparnasse routes.
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October 22, 1895 was a Tuesday. The baseball season was over. Saturday had been standardized as the day for football. And basketball and hockey were not yet professional. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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