No, this isn’t going to be about one of my mistakes, because I haven’t been caught in any of them yet, although you’re welcome to try in my latest story about the wild frontier of the 16th district.
An Amtrak train collided with a freight train Friday morning in one of Chicago’s south-side rail yards. Reporting for the AP wire, Deanna Bellandi opened the story with this paragraph:
An Amtrak train plowed into the back of a freight train and crushed one end of a boxcar under its wheels Friday, injuring dozens of people, some seriously. Most of the 187 passengers walked away unhurt.
If you look at this picture taken by Geoff Dougherty, you can see what she’s talking about, except…she made a slight mistake.
That’s a GE Genesis P42, and you can’t see it in this photo, but there’s a big number 8 on the side. I found a photo by Maurice Wright of the same engine looking a lot better back in 2003 on Jim Hebner’s unofficial Amtrak photo archive site. If you compare them, you can see that the superstructure—the colorful painted part of the locomotive containing the crew cab—has separated from the heavy locomotive frame and come to a rest on top of the red boxcar. The frame and the wheels are presumably still down on the track below.
(This is confirmed by a video from CBS 2 here in Chicago.)
So, when Bellandi wrote that the Amtrak train “crushed one end of a boxcar under its wheels,” she was making up a detail she hadn’t actually seen.
I’m sure she didn’t mean to. She probably saw what appeared to be a locomotive up on top of the damaged box car, and when she wrote about it later, she used the phrase “crushed…under its wheels” to paint a more vivid picture for her readers. After all, the locomotive was on top of the boxcar, and the boxcar was damaged, and locomotives have wheels, right?
I’m not trying to criticize Bellandi. She wrote a good story, and this detail of the collision isn’t very important. (And later stories about the crash omit mention of the wheels.) I’m just fascinated by how easy it is to mentally add something to a story because you assume it’s there.
In one of my police beat stories, I wrote that an arrested suspect was “picked out of a line-up” by a witness. However, when I checked my notes, I realized the cop had told me the suspect was “picked out,” but he didn’t say out of what. It could have been a line-up, but it could also have been a photo array or a book of mugshots. I ended up rewriting the sentence to avoid the issue.
I’ve caught myself a couple of other times making similar mistakes. Someday, someone else will catch me.
(By the way, the Geoff Dougherty who took the photo is the editor at Chi-Town Daily News. Here’s his take on the Amtrak story.)
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