Woman, 78, Survives After Train Broadsides Car : Accidents: Oxnard resident suffers a broken arm, bruised vertebrae and skinned shins in the collision at railroad crossing near Moorpark.

An Oxnard woman miraculously escaped serious injury Monday morning after her car was broadsided by an Amtrak train while crossing California 118 west of Moorpark.

Although the accident destroyed the right side of her car, Marjorie Duerden, 78, was released from Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks soon after the accident with only a broken arm, a few bruised vertebrae and skinned shins.

Firefighters at the scene said they were surprised to see Duerden awake and alert when they arrived. She told her daughter, Toni Rolfe, that she felt very fortunate.

“She said she was thinking about buying a lottery ticket,” Rolfe said. “She’s feeling pretty lucky.”

Duerden was headed for Simi Valley to take care of her granddaughter when she passed a railroad crossing guard just as it was coming down. Because of the unusual configuration of the intersection, her daughter said Duerden stopped on the tracks, thinking she was still behind the crossing gate. The gate she saw was actually on the other side of the tracks, and her car was on the tracks.

“She saw the lights, saw the train and heard the whistles, but she thought she was behind the crossing gate,” Rolfe said. “She didn’t realize she was on the tracks until the train hit her.”

The Los Angeles-bound passenger train slammed into Duerden’s late-model Thunderbird and knocked it 60 feet, pushing it off the road and away from the tracks.

The train had been traveling about 70 m.p.h., but started braking about 1,000 feet away, said Terry Wolf, the California Highway Patrol officer investigating the crash.

*

The train stopped after it hit the car, Wolf said. It was clear from the extent of the damage to Duerden’s car that if the train had hit the driver’s side she would have been killed, he said.

“If she were headed westbound, I don’t think she would still be with us,” Wolf said.

The railroad crossing is considered the 37th most dangerous in California, according to the state Public Utilities Commission, which has compiled a list of more than 60 dangerous crossing in the state.

In 1993, about 600 motorists nationwide lost their lives in train-related accidents. About 30 of those were in California.

The last fatal accident involving a train and a car in Ventura County occurred just before Christmas, 1992, when three farm workers were killed at an unmarked railroad crossing on a county road near where Duerden was struck.

While authorities say no train accidents have occurred at that California 118 crossing in recent memory, Moorpark city officials have long complained that it is dangerous. At least three people were killed there last year in two separate head-on car collisions.

The railroad track runs parallel to the two-lane highway. And when drivers are headed east toward Simi Valley, as was Duerden, the highway bends to the right, crossing the tracks.

Duerden failed to see the first crossing gate, which closed behind her. She stopped facing the gate on the opposite side of the tracks. She would have had to look over her right shoulder to see the train coming from behind, investigators said.