Amtrak Train Derails in Bayou, Killing 43 : Disaster: Sunset Limited from Los Angeles to Miami plunges off Alabama bridge, trapping passengers.

The Amtrak Sunset Limited from Los Angeles to Miami with 206 people aboard hurtled off its tracks on an aging trestle early Wednesday and plunged like a steel stone into a foggy Alabama bayou, killing 43 and trapping as many as 10 others in a passenger car that sank into ink-black swamp water crawling with snakes and alligators.

A locomotive erupted into flames, burning its crew. Fire spread to the wood-and-steel trestle. One of the coach cars hung over the edge of the 84-year-old structure, but did not fall. Riders, many of them asleep when the train derailed just after 3 a.m. local time, screamed and scrambled through the wreckage. Several rescued others, including a 3-year-old boy.

Amtrak said it was the worst train wreck in its history. Its toll could eclipse the cumulative total of 48 people killed in all crashes on Amtrak since it was created 23 years ago to run the nation’s long-distance passenger trains. Alabama Gov. Jim Folsom, who flew over the bayou as smoke and steam rose from the wreckage, said, “It was the most terrible sight I have ever witnessed.”

About 40 people on the train when it crashed had boarded in Los Angeles, an Amtrak official said. There was no immediate word on whether any of them were among the dead.

The National Transportation Safety Board began an investigation into the cause of the wreck. It was joined by the FBI, although an agency spokesman said there was no immediate indication of sabotage.

Tracks where the wreck happened are owned by CSX Transportation Inc., an Eastern railroad company. Last week the NTSB blamed poor track maintenance by CSX for an Amtrak crash that killed eight people two years ago in South Carolina. Hours after the crash, the mayor of Mobile, Ala., said he had received a report that a barge hit the trestle before the train crossed.

“We don’t have any clue as to what might have caused the accident,” said Dick Bussard, a spokesman for CSX, formerly the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad. CSX operates its own trains over its tracks in 20 states east of the Mississippi River. Bussard said the company inspected the tracks visually on Sunday and that Amtrak checked them and the trestle with a laser on Sept. 9.

The Sunset Limited, which became a coast-to-coast train five months ago by extending the eastern end of its run from New Orleans to Miami, carried 189 passengers and 17 crew members. It left Los Angeles on Sunday, changed crews in New Orleans and headed east toward Mobile. Shortly after 3 a.m. Wednesday, it approached the trestle over Canot Bayou about 10 miles north of Mobile.

An hour earlier, a 132-car CSX freight train with three locomotives had crossed the trestle without mishap.

The trestle speed limit for passenger trains is 70 m.p.h. It was not known how fast the Sunset Limited was rolling. Like most everyone, Mike Dopheide, 26, was asleep. He had gotten on in Los Angeles after visiting his sister in Highland Park. “Suddenly I was bumped on the floor, and you could hear the brakes squealing,” he said afterward. “I knew then that we had derailed.”

It was dark. Flames spread from one of the three locomotives, Dopheide said, and people around him could not find emergency exits. He said his car began filling with water and smoke.

“Oh, my God!” a woman shouted. “We’re going to die.”

Dopheide finally found a door and tried to open it. It would not budge. Then he noticed a piece of timber. It had smashed through a window, he said, and was keeping the car from submerging completely. Moreover, he noticed that it offered a way to escape. He climbed through the window and out onto the timber.

He saw four Amtrak crew members standing on the roof of one of the locomotives.

“Did you radio for help?” Dopheide shouted.

“No,” one of them replied. “There’s no radios.”

Around him Dopheide saw a tragedy. All three locomotives and four of the eight cars on the train were off the bridge and in the bayou. One of the cars was for baggage, another was a dormitory car for the crew. The other two were passenger coaches.

The water was 25 feet deep. One of the coach cars was covered completely. “We presume,” said Jacobsen, the Amtrak spokesman, “that those passengers drowned.” The nose of the 80-foot lead locomotive was buried in bayou silt. There were three crew members inside. A lounge car, a dining car, a sleeping car and a coach car were still on the trestle.

A third of the coach car hung over the edge.

In the glow from the burning locomotive, survivors--joined by rescuers in helicopters and nearby residents in boats--tried to save as many people as possible. Several of the passengers were elderly. Dopheide helped eight of them through the timber-shattered window.

A tugboat appeared, shining a high-intensity beam on the wreckage. The tug inched its way to the side of the railroad cars, but it pushed too much debris against them to get close. It backed away and sent in two flat-bottomed skiffs.

Dopheide helped his eight charges onto the boats.

Others climbed out of the train. They grabbed wooden debris to stay afloat until more help arrived. Dopheide was suddenly aware of the silence.

“Most people weren’t saying anything to me because they were too frightened to talk,” he said. “They were just holding onto debris or to each other. One lady was holding onto someone’s belt.”

Before long, the fire spread along the trestle and drew closer to wrecked cars.

Dopheide said he climbed back inside to see if anyone had been left behind. He searched for his glasses. People shouted at him, he said, asking him to look for medicine and purses. He said he threw out some duffel bags--but could not find his own belongings.

Then he scrambled back out to safety.

The bayou is home to snakes and alligators, some said bears as well. While alligators normally flee a disturbance as big as a train crash, some passengers in the water-filled cars worried about the snakes, which might be more venturesome.

“The car we were in sank,” said Robert Watts, 61, a retired fire captain from Placerville, Calif. Finally, he said, someone opened a safety exit and the water poured in, cold and fast.

“I guess I was physically moving,” Watts said later, “but I wasn’t mentally coherent until the water rose to my waist and I realized, ‘Hey this is serious, this is not a damn dream.’ ”

He compared the water to a whirlpool in a kitchen sink.

At one point, Watts thought he was going to die. “I thought, ‘This is it. I’m ending my life here.’ ”

A woman with a 3-year-old boy shouted from across the aisle. “The mother hollered to take the baby. I took him and shoved him out and hollered for someone to take the baby. Someone did. And all of us bailed out.”

Watts said he, his wife and several others held onto floating railroad ties. “My wife and I didn’t get to the same railroad tie, but we kept within eyesight.”

Every time he looked at his wife, he said, she seemed farther away. “But things were happening so fast,” he said, “there was no time to get scared.”

It was difficult, he said, to push the ties against the current in the bayou.

He was in the water about 30 minutes, he said, before reaching safety. Ashore, he found the 3-year-old and his mother.

“That little boy never fussed or bothered. He just thought, ‘Hey, this is a great game!’ ”

Not far away, Al Paiz, 52, of Mora, N.M., watched another rescue.

Seated next to him in one of the train cars was Fred Russell, 70, of Indio, Calif. “There was suddenly a roller coaster sensation,” Paiz said. “Then the train was skidding on the track. It jumped, and everybody started sliding.”

When the car finally came to rest, Paiz said, Russell pulled out a man who had gotten trapped under a seat. Together, Russell and Paiz opened an emergency window. It was a long drop to the water below.

Paiz said they heard noises.

“There was a kid in the water having trouble,” he said. “He could not swim. Fred jumped out the window and dropped 20 feet to the water below to help him out.”

Paiz, who cannot swim, said he greatly admired his septuagenarian seatmate for taking that plunge.

For his part, Paiz said, he helped other passengers out through a window on the lower side of his car. He said he was the last to leave.

“I’m sure some of the people didn’t get out,” Paiz said, through tears.

Paiz, who was on his way to Miami for open heart surgery, said he tried hard to stay calm as he finally dropped from one of the lower windows six feet into the water.

The water was over his head, he said, and he held onto beams from the bridge until a boat came by and rescued him.

By now, divers were going through submerged portions of the railroad cars hand over hand. There was little or no light underwater. William Woodail, the head of one team of divers, said some of the dead remained in the car that was completely submerged.

Others, he said, remained in the burned locomotive.

“Search conditions are very difficult because of the murky waters,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Dwight McGee.

The divers lifted bodies onto a barge. From there, they were taken to a lumberyard in the nearby town of Chickasaw. It served as a temporary morgue.

At one point during the afternoon, the search for bodies and survivors was suspended when it became apparent that a crane was needed to stabilize one of the railroad cars before divers could enter it safely.

Times staff writers Richard E. Meyer in Los Angeles and David G. Savage in Washington and researcher Edith Stanley in Saraland, Ala., also contributed to this story.

* AMTRAK HOT LINE: A number has been established for those with questions about passengers aboard the Sunset Limited. It is 1-800-523-9101.

Deadliest Wrecks

The deadliest U.S. rail accidents since World War II, not counting Wednesday’s wreck.

Toll Date Location 84 Feb. 6, 1951 Woodbridge, N.J. 79 Nov. 22, 1950 Richmond Hill, N.Y. 48 Sept. 15, 1958 Elizabethport, N.J. 45 Oct. 30, 1972 Chicago 45 April 25, 1946 Naperville, Ill. 33 Sept. 11, 1950 Coshocton, Ohio 31 Feb. 17, 1950 Rockville Centre, N.Y. 30 Jan. 22, 1956 Los Angeles 24 Feb. 18, 1947 Gallitzin, Pa. 21 March 27, 1953 Conneaut, Ohio

Source: Associated Press