More than 20 injured as commuter trains collide outside N.Y.
NEW YORK -- A train derailment and collision during evening rush hour injured 20 to 25 people, but none of the injuries are life-threatening, police in Fairfield, Conn., said Friday as emergency workers began scouring the mangled wreckage blocking the tracks north of New York City.
Matt Panilaitis, a Fairfield Police Department spokesman, told the Los Angeles Times that one train sideswiped the other after derailing, causing some cars of the second train to also go off the tracks outside the Fairfield station.
The incident occurred shortly after 6 p.m. and involved a train coming from Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, about 50 miles away, and a second train heading into New York City.
Photographs taken by passengers in the affected trains and posted on Twitter showed broken windows and twisted metal inside the train cars, splintered tracks, and the front left corner of one of the trains smashed in. Amtrak halted service between New York and Boston indefinitely.
A rider on one of the trains, Wayne Travers Jr., told the New Haven Register that he was in the last car of the train when the ride became bumpier than normal. “Then it got more bumpy, and the conductor that I was standing next to was knocked down,” he said. “I was knocked out of my seat. The train came to rest and was tilted on an angle.”
Metro-North, the New York-based commuter railway whose trains were involved, described the incident as a “major derailment” but gave no immediate information on casualties. It said the incident involved a train that had left Manhattan at 4:41 p.m. and another train that had departed from New Haven at 5:30 p.m. The trains were on adjacent tracks when the one coming from Manhattan went off the tracks and hit the second train.
The National Transportation Safety Board said it would investigate the cause. “At this stage, we don’t know if this is a mechanical failure, an accident or something deliberate,” a Fairfield police spokesman, Lt. James Perez, told the Connecticut Post.
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