During the evening rush hour on August 24, 1928, an express subway train derailed immediately after leaving the Times Square station on the IRT Broadway–Seventh Avenue Line.

It remains the second-deadliest accident on the New York City Subway system, after the Malbone Street Wreck.

[6] Morris De Haven Tracy of the United Press wrote an account of the crash that had left the city "still dazed": [The eighth car] "split the switch," and before the passengers jammed within it could raise their cries of terror it was skidding half sideways down the track.

A hundred feet farther on it crashed into one of the great steel pillars which keep the street above from tumbling in upon the tunnels.

[3][14] Some newspapers ran a photograph taken soon after the accident, which showed a view into the street where emergency vehicles and police were gathering.

[13] The maintenance foreman on the scene, William Baldwin, said at the time that someone in the signaling tower located in the tunnel south of 40th Street must have pushed the button to open the switch, but the towerman, Harry King, maintained that no one had, leading to the suspicion that Baldwin had activated it from trackside with his assistant holding down the automatic brake tripper.

[23] In early October, he admitted that he had been using a false identity and was really Harry Stockdale, a man from Baltimore who had been convicted in a stabbing there.