Ship
28
295
CASEY JONES
By riding this Illinois Central 4-6-0 or Ten-wheeler type to his death at Vaughan,
Mississippi, in the dark early morning of April 30, 1900, John Luther Jones,
nicknamed "Casey," became a folksong hero and his name was added to our
language as a term meaning locomotive engineer or railroad man. An early version
of the Casey Jones song has the "brave engineer” making his trip to the Promised
Land” on a "six-eight wheeler,” a type which never existed. Casey's fast passenger
train rammed the caboose of a freight train moving slowly into a siding. The
battered locomotive, originally the 382, was rebuilt and renumbered successively
212, 2012 and 5012. She had other fatal accidents, was branded a hoodoo, and
finally went to the scrap pile in 1935. Casey's last home in Jackson, Tennessee, is
now a railroad museum. Among the exhibits there is this Ten-wheeler, renumbered
to simulate his famous, but doomed engine.
CASEY JONES MUSEUM
