In the early morning hours of October 21, 1959, Mount Prospect experienced a crisis like never before. 24 freight cars spanning from Main Street to School Street derailed off the Chicago and North Western tracks due to a hot bearing box. A local patrolman had been driving down Northwest Highway and saw the flames shooting from the wheels of one of the freight cars. He tried racing to the front of the train to warn the engineer but before he could reach the engine, the cars derailed.
Freight cars and pieces of track were strewn everywhere and even the train station sustained damage from train cars that had jumped onto the platform. Around 15,000 commuters were late for work and traffic was at a standstill in suburbs neighboring Mount Prospect. However, if this crash would have happened any later in the morning, there would have been hundreds of commuters on the train platform resulting in a major tragedy instead of an inconvenience. Wreckage on the tracks in downtown Mount Prospect was cleared by the evening and the undamaged train cars were sent on their way.
