Dozens Injured as Train Derails Near Chicago

An Amtrak train bound for New Orleans rammed into a tractor-trailer truck loaded with steel Monday night, derailing and bursting into flames. Dozens of passengers were sent to local hospitals.

At least a half-dozen of the passengers were in critical condition at hospitals in Kankakee, near where the City of New Orleans derailed about 9:40 p.m. in the town of Bourbonnais. Between 250 and 400 passengers were on the train at the time of the accident, Amtrak spokeswoman Debbie Hare said.

Two of the train’s locomotives and five of its 14 passenger cars were thrown from the tracks. One of the passenger cars was lying on its side as rescue workers extracted the injured while four remained upright but askew on the tracks. One of the engines was half-demolished and several of the cars were still smoldering in the early hours today.

The force of the impact was so great the tracks were twisted back on themselves.

The driver of the truck walked away from the crash with slight injuries, authorities said.

Dozens of emergency vehicles responded to the crash, some coming from as far away as Chicago. Helicopters landed in surrounding fields to take the most seriously injured to area hospitals and the Red Cross set up a shelter for the uninjured at a nearby school.

“I saw fire first, and then as we got closer, we saw that one car was completely destroyed,” Lorri Grislak, a nearby resident, told WMAQ-TV, the NBC affiliate in Chicago. “It’s an unbelievable wreck.”

The train was traveling a main line between the Midwest and the South at the time of the crash, and the derailment would likely cause delays for at least several days, said an Amtrak official in Wilmington, Del., who asked not to be identified.

The tractor-trailer, loaded with steel bars used to reinforce concrete, was coming from the nearby Birmingham Steel Co., said Ed St. Louis of the Bourbonnais Fire Protection District. The trailer of the truck was demolished, but the cab remained intact.