What was the name of the Illinois express on which Casey Jones lost his life in 1900
Casey Jones (TV series) of St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife, Alice, their young son, Casey, Jr., and their dog Cinders. Although there really was a famous locomotive engineer named Casey Jones of the Illinois Central Railroad, the television series is loosely based on him. However, it uses the real names of his train, the "Cannonball Express". The name of the character Wallie Sims is a conflation of Illinois Central employee Wallace Saunders, who wrote the earliest version of "The Ballad of Casey Jones," and the real Jones' fireman, Simeon "Sim" Webb. Unlike Wallie Sims, both Saunders and Webb were African-American. Kenneth Gamet, the
Casey Jones Casey Jones Jonathan Luther "Casey" Jones (March 14, 1863 – April 30, 1900) from Jackson, Tennessee, was an American railroader who worked for the Illinois Central Railroad (IC). He was killed on April 30, 1900, when his train collided with a stalled freight train near Vaughan, Mississippi. His dramatic death while trying to stop his train and save the lives of his passengers made him a hero; he was immortalized in a popular ballad sung by his friend Wallace Saunders, an African-American engine wiper for the IC. As a boy, he lived near Cayce, Kentucky, where he acquired the nickname