A violent storm washed debris onto a grade crossing, derailing a Lackawanna Railroad (DL&W) train.

The trip was an annual excursion organized through steamship agent Leopold Neumann to allow midwestern Germans to visit their homeland.

The train passed through Binghamton, New York, about 10:30 p.m. and then made a stop at Scranton, Pennsylvania, just before midnight for a crew and engine change.

[2] The train had been scheduled to travel via the Lackawanna Cut-Off, but because of freight traffic on the line the towerman at Slateford Junction rerouted the special over the Old Road of the Lackawanna, an alternate route that was to take the train through the New Jersey towns of Washington, and Hackettstown, before rejoining the main line near Lake Hopatcong.

What they found was a horrific scene: in the pitch darkness of the cloudy night of this bucolic setting was indescribable suffering amongst dozens of train passengers.

Joseph Snyder, a local farmer who witnessed the accident and also helped spread word across the town, would later say of the wreck site, "There were men and women and kids all around everywhere, screaming worse than I ever heard".

Daniels, closed a door through which steam was spewing, saving many passengers' lives but suffering severe burns.

Seven bodies were ultimately pulled from the wreck, including Loomis who, according to the lurid accounts of the day, had been impaled upon the engineer's controls in the locomotive's cab.

In addition to Loomis, the fireman, the conductor, and the head brakeman died in or because of the accident; the flagman, who was at the rear of the train, was the only railroad employee aboard to survive.

Also, an off-duty railroader who was riding in the locomotive cab at the time of the accident, W. Kenney, was initially listed amongst the injured, but subsequently died.

Indeed, rescue trains took the injured in opposite directions from the crash site to hospitals in Morristown and Easton, destinations that were 50 miles (80 km) apart.

[2] A joint investigation by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and the New Jersey Board of Public Utility Commissioners found that there was no blame to be apportioned and that the accident had been caused by an Act of God.

[3] Several days after the accident, a jury convened in a coroner's inquest at the new opera house in Washington, New Jersey, and heard testimony that pinpointed the cause of the derailment.

Clayton surmised that this loose debris had been washed down the steep slope during the rain storm and then onto the grade crossing where it clogged the flangeways, thus leading to the derailment.

[9] A small garden and a brass plaque, laid on the 70th anniversary of the wreck, commemorate the site "where 50 people died or were fatally injured, some from the impact of the crash but most from the inescapable steam".