34 People Hurt as Amtrak Train Jumps Tracks

An Amtrak train carrying mail and 113 people jumped the track at 60 mph Saturday, sideswiping another Amtrak train and landing in a swamp. Thirty-four people were injured.

The derailment disrupted service between Newark and New York City all day, with two tracks closed. Regular service was expected today.

No one aboard the sideswiped train was hurt. Amtrak said 17 passengers and 15 employees aboard the mail train were treated for minor injuries and released from local hospitals. Two employees remained hospitalized for observation.

The train’s two locomotives, a mail car and three passenger cars derailed, Amtrak spokesman Rick Remington said. The train was en route from Washington to Boston with 88 passengers and 25 Amtrak employees.

Afterward, the cars lay in a zigzag pattern in the wetlands mud. Some passengers had to stand in knee-deep water for about 30 minutes before they were rescued.

Amtrak foreman Kenneth Waiters of Philadelphia, who was traveling to Connecticut with his wife to celebrate her birthday, said the accident was a blur.

“All I know is we were in a swamp,” said Waiters, 43. “I heard a loud thump and everything started going bumpy . . . and we were in a swamp. I thought I was dead.”

Waiters and his wife, Norma, were not seriously hurt and Secaucus Mayor Anthony Just said the marshy crash site minimized injuries.

“The wetlands sponged it . . . it’s like a big cushion,” Just said.

The crash came just after the 12-car Fast Mail train had crossed the Hackensack River Bridge in this northern New Jersey city about 6 miles west of New York City.

After a stop in Newark, it was en route to New York and going 60 mph, the bridge speed limit, said an Amtrak police officer who refused to give his name.

The sideswiped train, The Carolinian, was traveling from New York to Charlotte, N.C. Passengers on the southbound train had to change to another train in Newark, Remington said.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known, although the bridge at the scene had been worked on the night before.

“There was an electrical problem with the bridge last night that was looked at, and we don’t see any connection between that and what happened here,” Remington said.

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National Transportation Safety Board investigators will look into the operation of the drawbridge as a possible cause of the derailment, NTSB spokesman Peter Goelz told Reuters.

Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) told reporters at the scene that the derailment may have been caused by the drawbridge leaving an improper alignment of the track. “The track did not connect as it should,” he said.

Some crash victims were taken to a senior center for coffee and to gather their nerves before boarding buses for New York City.

“They’re sort of in shock,” Just said. “When you get through that and you see it as you walk past, you’re lucky to be alive.”