Train crash kills 1, hurts 100

Transit run plows into N.J. station, collapses part of roof

People look through the wreckage Thursday of the New Jersey Transit commuter train that ran off the end of the track and crashed about 8:45 a.m. at the station in Hoboken, N.J.
People look through the wreckage Thursday of the New Jersey Transit commuter train that ran off the end of the track and crashed about 8:45 a.m. at the station in Hoboken, N.J.

HOBOKEN, N.J. -- A rush-hour commuter train crashed through a barrier at the busy Hoboken station and lurched across the waiting area Thursday morning, killing one person and injuring more than 100 others.

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People pulled chunks of concrete off pinned and bleeding victims, passengers kicked out windows and crawled to safety, and 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, the train knocked out pillars and a section of the roof collapsed.

"The train didn't stop. It just didn't stop," said Tom Spina, who was in the terminal and rushed to help the victims.

[INTERACTIVE: Map of today's crash, data on other fatal train wrecks]

Ross Bauer was sitting in the third or fourth car when the train entered the 109-year-old station, a bustling hub for commuters heading to New York City.

"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 hospitalized, but officials said he had been released by evening. He was cooperating with investigators, Gov. Chris Christie said.

A woman standing on the 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. Seventy-four people were hospitalized, some with serious injuries that included 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 late Thursday 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, National Transportation Safety Board Vice Chairman Bella Dinh-Zarr said.

Gallagher, the engineer, has worked for New Jersey Transit for 29 years, and a union roster shows that 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, Dinh-Zarr 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 New Jersey Transit's trains are fully equipped with positive train control, which relies on radio and GPS signals to monitor trains' positions and speeds.

The National Transportation Safety Board 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.

"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 U.S. 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 is too soon to say whether such technology would have made a difference in Thursday's crash.

Over the past 20 years, the National Transportation Safety Board 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.

New Jersey Transit trains going into Hoboken have in-cab systems designed to alert engineers and stop locomotives when they go over 20 mph, according to a New Jersey 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 are also equipped with alerter systems -- a sort of dead man's device -- that sound loud alarms and eventually stop the train if the engineers go 15-20 seconds without touching the controls.

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 City. After arriving at Hoboken, they take ferries or Port Authority commuter trains across the river to the city.

Passengers said the train, which set out from Spring Valley, N.Y., was crowded, with standing room only in the typically popular first few cars, but authorities had no immediate estimate of how many were aboard.

Information for this article was contributed by Deepti Hajela, Michael Catalini, Jennifer Peltz, Verena Dobnik and Joan Lowy of The Associated Press.

A Section on 09/30/2016

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