DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I want you to hear every word of it. March 14, 1940. Tower Road, Hidalgo County, right here where a stretch of Texas highway meets the Missouri Pacific rail line.
On paper, it's just a crossing — the kind you pass a hundred times without thinking. But on that morning, it became the site of the deadliest automobile accident on a Texas highway in the entire twentieth century. A truck was moving through this crossing carrying more than forty agricultural workers.
Forty people. Men, women — and children, because the youngest among them was just ten years old. The oldest was forty-eight.
These were working people, out doing what working people in the Rio Grande Valley did, riding together toward another day in the fields. And then the train came. The Missouri Pacific locomotive collided with that truck right here, and thirty-four of those workers were killed.
Thirty-four lives, gone at a single crossing on a single morning in March. The neighboring citrus packing plant — standing just close enough to matter — became the headquarters for rescue operations. Think about that for a moment.
A building built for sorting fruit suddenly holding the weight of a community's worst day. The tragedy rippled out far beyond this intersection. It shook the Alamo community, and it shook the whole Rio Grande Valley.
And out of that grief came something — renewed attention to safety at railroad crossings, and to the conditions under which agricultural workers were being transported. The marker doesn't dress that up, and neither will I. Thirty-four people.
Ten to forty-eight years old. One crossing. That's what this place remembers.
What the marker says
On March 14, 1940, at this crossing of Tower Road and the Missouri Pacific rail line occurred an automobile accident resulting in the most fatalities on a Texas highway in the 20th century. An oncoming train collided with a truck carrying more than 40 agricultural workers, killing 34 of the workers, who ranged in age from ten to 48. The neighboring citrus packing plant served as headquarters for rescue operations. The tragedy affected many lives in the Alamo community and across the Rio Grande Valley, resulting in renewed attention to safety issues surrounding railroad crossings and the transportation of agricultural workers. (2002)