It was an average Thursday morning commute. Strangers whizzed by each other as they boarded their usual trains at the busy Hoboken station – drinking their morning coffee and tinkering on their phones – when a sudden crash turned their routine into a nightmare.
A rush hour commuter train crashed through a barrier at the busy Hoboken station and lurched across the waiting area in a grisly wreck that renewed questions about whether long-delayed automated safety technology could have prevented tragedy.
(William Sun via AP)
People pulled chunks of concrete off pinned and bleeding victims, passengers kicked out windows and crawled to safety as cries and screams could be heard in the wreckage as emergency workers rushed to reach the injured in the tangle of twisted metal and dangling wires just across the Hudson River from New York City.
The New Jersey Transit train ran off the end of the track as it was pulling in around 8:45 a.m., smashing through a concrete-and-steel bumper. As it ground to a halt in the waiting area, it knocked out pillars, collapsing a section of the roof.
“The train didn’t stop. It just didn’t stop,” said Tom Spina, who was in the terminal and rushed to try to help the victims.
Ross Bauer was sitting in the third or fourth car when the train entered the historic 109-year-old station, a bustling hub for commuters heading to New York.
“All of a sudden, there was an abrupt stop and a big jolt that threw people out of their seats. The lights went out, and we heard a loud crashing noise like an explosion” as the roof fell, he said. “I heard panicked screams, and everyone was stunned.”
The engineer, Thomas Gallagher, was pulled from the mangled first car and was hospitalized, but officials said he had been released by evening. He was cooperating with investigators, Gov. Chris Christie said.
(AP Photo)
A woman standing on the train platform — Fabiola Bittar de Kroon, 34, of Hoboken, a former employee in the legal department of the business software company SAP in Brazil — was killed by debris, and 108 others were injured, mostly on the train, Christie said. Scores were hospitalized, some with serious injuries including broken bones.
“The train came in at much too high rate of speed, and the question is: ‘Why is that?'” Christie said.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said investigators will determine whether the explanation was equipment failure, an incapacitated engineer or something else.
Some witnesses said they didn’t hear or feel the brakes being applied before the crash. Authorities would not estimate how fast the train was going. But the speed limit heading into the station is 10 mph.
The National Transportation Safety Board planned to pull one of the black-box event recorders Thursday evening from the locomotive at the back of the train. The device contains information on the train’s speed and braking.
But it wasn’t safe enough yet for investigators to extract the second recorder from the engineer’s compartment because of the collapsed roof and the possibility of asbestos in the old building, NTSB vice chairwoman T. Bella Dinh-Zarr said.
Gallagher, the engineer, has worked for NJ Transit for 29 years, and a union roster shows he started as an engineer about 18 years ago. Neighbors describe Gallagher and his family as good people.
Investigators will examine the engineer’s performance and the condition of the train, track and signals, among other things, she said. They also plan to look into whether positive train control — a system designed to prevent accidents by overriding the engineer and automatically slowing or stopping trains that are going too fast — could have helped.
None of NJ Transit’s trains is fully equipped with positive train control, which relies on radio and GPS signals to monitor trains’ position and speed.
The NTSB has been pressing for some version of the technology for at least 40 years, and the industry is under government orders to install it, but regulators have repeatedly extended the deadline at railroads’ request. The target date is now the end of 2018.
( Ian Samuel via AP)
“While we are just beginning to learn the cause of this crash, it appears that once again an accident was not prevented because the trains our commuters were riding lacked positive train control,” said Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y. “The longer we fail to prioritize investing in rail safety technology, the more innocent lives we put in jeopardy.”
Cuomo, a Democrat, and Christie, a Republican, said it was too soon to say whether such technology would have made a difference.
Over the past 20 years, the NTSB has listed the lack of positive train control as a contributing factor in 25 crashes. Those include the Amtrak wreck last year in Philadelphia in which a speeding train ran off the rails along a curve. Eight people were killed.
Even without positive train control, there are still safeguards in place at the Hoboken terminal.
NJ Transit trains going into Hoboken have an in-cab system that is designed to alert engineers and stop locomotives when they go over 20 mph, according to an NJ Transit engineer who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the accident.
Trains like the one in Thursday’s crash also are equipped with an alerter system — a sort of dead man’s device — that sounds a loud alarm and eventually stops the train if the engineer goes 15 to 20 seconds without touching the controls.
But it was unclear whether those mechanisms kicked in or would have made a difference if they had.
The train was not equipped with an inward-facing camera in the cab that could give a fuller picture of the operator’s actions, though Dinh-Zarr said it did have outward-facing cameras on both ends.
The Hoboken terminal handles more than 50,000 train and bus riders daily, many of them headed into New York. After arriving at Hoboken, the commuters take ferries or PATH commuter trains across the river to the city.
Passengers said the train, which set out from Spring Valley, New York, was crowded, with standing room only in the typically popular first few cars, but authorities had no immediate estimate of how many were aboard.
(AP Photo/Joe Epstein)
Jamie Weatherhead-Saul was standing at a door between the first and second cars. She said the crash hurled passengers against her, and one woman got her leg caught between the doors before fellow riders pulled her up.
Michael Larson, an NJ Transit employee working in the terminal about 30 feet away, said he saw the train go over the “bumper block” and lift up into the air, stopping only when it hit the wall of the station’s waiting room.
As the train hurtled into the depot amid concrete dust and dangling electrical wires, “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said.
William Blaine, an engineer for a company that runs freight trains, said he saw the train’s engineer slumped over the controls after the crash.
More than 100,000 people use NJ Transit trains to commute from New Jersey into New York every day. With the Hoboken station still closed as of Thursday evening, NJ Transit trains out of Penn Station in Manhattan were crowded with commuters forced to find a detour around Hoboken.
“My 30-minute commute is turning into at least an hour and a half,” said Steve Malfitano, who had to go into New York just to get from one New Jersey city to another. But he added: “It is what it is. It’s better than what those people had to go through.”
In 2011, a PATH commuter train crash at the Hoboken station injured more than 30 people. The train slammed into bumpers at the end of the tracks on a Sunday morning.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
I was sure we would get more update then this. we already knew this and waiting for updates.. If America transportation are out of date, bad conditions or terrorist attack. IMAM called for attacks on USA and world transportations. So we the people know what to expect and protect ourselves.. And a Dictator from overseas telling Americans to get use to these things, are you kidding me, this is a threat to USA
I am a WWII Veteran and worked about 42 years for the Santa Fe Railroad. One of my jobs during the early 1950’s was working on ATC (Automatic Train Control). This was a very good system in alarming the Engineer of speed and other safety factors. The Engineer was required to keep his foot on a safety device that IF his foot was removed for just a second it would go into “BIG HOLE” condition and bring air to all brakes on every set of wheels in the entire train. My job as working as a Federal Inspector ( paid $0.06 per hour more than regular rate) and in Power testing each Locomotive the “Big Hole” air test was required and MUST be in working condition OR that Diesel unit was not put into service until the problem was cleared. This type of ATC had a receiver on the last set of wheels of the lead unit, engineer side. As the train moved it would pass over a transmitting device located at every switching tower along the main line. The signal was sent from the receiver to the signal device placed atop the brake station. The signal was a 3 light device similar to a traffic signal, it had green on top light. an amber light in the center and a red light on the bottom. So at ALL times the Train Engineer KNEW what was ahead for safe operation of his train.
We send billions of dollars to foreign countries with no strings attached and the dictators become rich, then we are told to get use to terrorist attacks. Time for accountability and change the way we fund the priorities in the USA.
Another prime example of a goverment out of control. To even allow there to be an acceptable excuse as to why the latest safety technology is not in place to protect American citizens when they have no trouble justifying the spending of 6 Trillion dollars blowing up the Middle East, more billions taking in terrorist refugees, and the list of insane crap goes on and on. Aren’t Americans tired yet of reactive government instead of true leadership that is proactive- it’s not as is this problem has not been questioned before- only for the last 25 years at least. It’s not that I just want heads to roll, because I do…. but for all governments to wake up and realize what they are there for. Read our constitution….. or at least the preamble….”Provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare… ” You guys are doing a dismal job.
You are so right!!! That is why we need Trump!!!! He is the only one that will shake things up and try to do something about it!!! Otherwise, we will continue to see our country deteriorating with Hillary continuing and finishing Obama’s agenda!!!! And with Obama having Muslims placed in every branch of our government along with the Muslim Brotherhood group…all the same in my book!!! So we are being slowly being infiltrated and taken over from within. Wake up America!!!! It may already be too late!!!!!
Never to late if we eliminate.
TRUMP is needed now
Never to late if we eliminate
agreed. we need to be united to protect ourselves, our country and for our future generations. No matter what you see in the Media, don’t fall for it. the establishments especially the media will do and say anything to elect Hilary to put her in the white house. wonder how much the Media are getting paid from the Clintons? Her AD costs $250 million already against Trump. a lot of big organizations, billionaires, are her donors while Trump’s donors are just small people like us. Let’s encourage our relatives, friends and tell them the truth about Clintons
And billions of dollars are being spent to bring Muslims to America, and money being sent to Iran so they can develop the nuke! Enough said
Muslim in the White House…what do we expect would happen?
yes Doug and Mike… Enough is enough!
I THOUGHT THEY STILL HAD THE GAY ENGINEER, GOIN 108 MPH, READING HIGH TIMES IN THE BATHROOM, WHILE THE TRAIN WAS HAULIN ASS DOWN THE TRACK, SEEMS ODD THAT THEY ARE HAVING SO MANY RR ACCIDENTS, AN DERAILMENTS. AND THE FIRST ONE WASNT THAT LONG AGO. THE NEWS MEDIA HAS BEEN SILENT ABOUT THE 108 MPH TRAIN WRECK, I WONDER WHY?
TELL ME WHY MY BLOG IS WAITING MODERATION, THERE WHERE NO LIES IN THERE. COULD IT BE THAT THE HORN IS GOIN LIBERAL?
Not being there makes it hard to say but I would bet that this is mechanical issues are the problem. The operator was an old hand and most likely had been in and out of the terminal at least a thousand times.. I am most likely wrong.
DAVE I WORKED ON A RR FOR A LONG TIME. THEY ARE VERY SAFETY CONSIOUS, THERE ALL SORTS OF DEVICES IN THE CAB, THAT KEEPTHE ENGINEER IN CHECK. AN EQUIPMENT FAILURE IS A GOOD POSSIBILITY. SO IS BAD TRACK.
Equipment failure, bad track – -what about possible medical emergency??
Always amazes me that something dire takes place when the democrats are losing. So, I don’t trust that this just happened! There are supposedly safety guards on trains today and yet this one didn’t seem to work. Why? A train problem? A terrorist problem? You can bet we won’t get the whole truth just as we did not on the serious non-breaking train wreck. Just how dumb do they think we are? That, of course, does not include the majority of democrats who are dumb! Were their computers attacked as this can and is happening a lot since most later model cars are literally run on various types of computers: i.e., blue tooth, CPS, and all other gadgets which can be taken over by smart outside computer crackers (crackers are bad, hackers are the good guys for all you who do not know this) and your control is GONE!
As a little boy about 65 years ago, I had an electric train set that stopped automatically at the station and even unloaded cargo automatically. It required no human intervention to do so. The problem here is most likely that the installation of automated devices on trains would put a lot of RR employees out of work. Hence it is not done. This can be blamed on politicians obeying the orders of union chiefs.
Back in the early 70’s I was station in the San Francisco bay area by the Navy for school, the ‘BART’ (Bay Area Rapid Transit) was fairly new and one of their trains ran off the end of the tracks at San Jose, don’t remember if it was operator error or computer, but a 10 year old boy sent a letter to the newspaper asking why the trains they were using didn’t have an automatic ‘Dead Man Switch’ on the lead car like the trains use to have before, it was just level that stuck above the roof just far enough for it to be tripped by a bar if the train went past a certain point on a dead end track and throw all the brakes on . I guess if it’s not some fancy doodad thunk up by some engineer it ‘s no good
Of course the rails had much passenger business in WWII and a short time afterwards. Then as automobiles took over that business and the interstate highways, the rails were put into a double squeeze by the government and the unions and equipment often suffered. There were block controls over sections of track from very early days and passenger trains normally backed into depots. Backing into depots would negate running over backstops certainly. And what would be the difference as to whether the train backed while entering or backed while leaving? When there were Pullman cars as the last cars in the train, backing into the depot meant they walked less. Amtrak still has two riding classes and in fact make first class so expensive it can only be afforded on “other peoples money”—i.e. a business travel accounts. And look at the subsidies necessary to keep the poor service of Amtrak even going! Personally, I would rather take a train than fly any day.
chilling developments in N.J. train crash………I am sorry……I read the article and did not see any “developments”. News people lie to get ratings