12 Die in Train Collision Near Nation’s Capital

An Amtrak passenger train bound for Chicago and a local commuter train crashed head-on just north of the nation’s capital during a snowstorm Friday. At least 12 people were killed and a score were injured.

A massive roar, apparently an electrical explosion, followed the collision as the two Amtrak locomotives and several other cars jumped the tracks. One Amtrak locomotive and several passenger cars from the commuter train were engulfed in flames. The locomotive’s front was demolished, its side torn with a gaping hole, its engineer’s cab heavily damaged.

“When the firefighters first arrived at the scene, there were people banging on the windows and trying to get out,” said Lt. Denise Fox, spokeswoman for the Montgomery County, Md., fire department.

The dead were trapped in a car of the commuter train, victims of multiple trauma and fire, she said. None were immediately identified.

“There may be more, but for sure there are 12” dead, Fox said. Local hospitals reported treating 21 people for injuries.

Mike Ross of Sand Point, Idaho, was sitting in the Amtrak train’s seventh car. “Most of the people in my car were on the floor” after the crash, Ross said. “We hit a commuter train head on. We hit them pretty hard. It threw a lot of people on the ground.”

“It was quite a jolt,” said Barry Mardi of Washington, a passenger on the Amtrak train. “Little kids were flying, but they were all right.”

Mike Hall, a Montgomery County spokesman, said bodies of the dead were left in the wreck as investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board combed through the twisted steel.

Brian Hall, a volunteer firefighter, said passengers were panicking when he and another rescuer clambered aboard the Amtrak train.

“There were about 30 people in that particular car, who looked like they were in a total state of disarray,” Hall said. “We grabbed two or three of the more seriously injured ones and loaded them into ambulances.

“Some were yelling, just frantically yelling, because of the tremendous shock. . . . Others were just sitting there like they didn’t know what had [happened],” he said.

The collision involved a 15-car Amtrak train led by two 130-ton locomotives, and a four-car commuter train led by a coach weighing only about 60 tons. The commuter train’s locomotive was pushing from the rear.

It occurred about 5:45 p.m. EST, about half an hour after Amtrak’s Capitol Limited carrying 175 passengers plus crew left Washington’s Union Station bound for Chicago.

The commuter train was being pushed toward Union Station but was stopped just north of the District of Columbia city limit when the Amtrak locomotive crashed head-on into passenger cars on the local train, said Nanci Philips, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Transit Administration.

All Amtrak passenger cars were believed to have stayed upright on the tracks, Amtrak said, and Amtrak reported 12 minor injuries among its passengers and crew.

Bill Gatchel, an Amtrak passenger, told a television interviewer he was playing solitaire in the lounge car “and all at once, a big crash happened. We jerked, and that’s all I can really tell you.”

“When I got off the train, I saw one engine off the track,” Gatchel said. “I saw smoke rising that looked like it was from another engine, I’m not sure.”

“I heard a big boom; it sounded like a bomb,” said Barbara Freeman, 39, who lives in a first floor apartment in a building next to the track. “We looked out the living room window, and all we were seeing was smoke and a big ball of fire.”

The cause of the crash was uncertain. Warren Monks, a spokesman for the Maryland Transit Administration, said information from the scene was sketchy but added: “We were having some switch problems.”

Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said Congress has passed stringent rail safety laws in response to past crashes, but more may need to be done.

Pressler said that automatic equipment is supposed to kick in “to override a human error in most switching situations.” He said his committee, which has jurisdiction over rail safety, may hold hearings as early as March.

The crash occurred in areas where twin tracks run about a mile from a Washington area Metro subway station, within 50 feet of a high-rise apartment building and within 100 feet of a complex of garden apartments.

Spokeswoman Margaret Fitzwilliam at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md., said the hospital was treating one patient in critical condition with smoke inhalation and two in fair condition--one with rib injuries and the other with a concussion.