He said speed was not a likely factor because trains on that line have systems that prevent excessive speeds and collisions. “Did the switch play some role? It might have been that the front of the train hit the switch and it started fish-tailing and that flipped the back part of the train,” Clarke said.Īnother possibility was a defect in the rail, Clarke said, noting that regular testing doesn’t always catch such problems. He said it was unclear whether some of the last cars moved onto the second track. Railroad safety expert David Clarke, director of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee, said the two locomotives and two cars at the front of the train reached the switch and continued on the main track, but the remaining eight cars derailed. “I’m a pretty big guy and it picked me up from my chair and threw me into one wall and then threw me into the other wall,” Cordeiro said. He said the train car left the tracks near a switch where two tracks narrow to one but did not fall over. “I was in one of the front cars and we got badly jostled, thrown from one side of the train to the other,” he told MSNBC. RELATED: "One of the worst": Wildfire in Arizona mining town destroys at least 13 homes, prompts hundreds to evacuate
#AMTRAK TRAIN DERAILMENT TODAY WINDOWS#
He called his brother to bring ladders for people who couldn’t get down after exiting through the windows of cars resting on their sides. “I started looking at that, wondering what it was and then I saw the train had tipped over and derailed,” said Fossen, who called 911 and started trying to get people out. The Joplin resident was on a dirt road near the tracks Saturday when he saw “a wall of dust” hundreds of feet high. It had two locomotives and 10 cars, eight of which derailed, with some tipping onto their sides. Amtrak spokesman Jason Abrams said the train was carrying about 141 passengers and 16 crew members. Saturday near Joplin, a town of about 200. The westbound Empire Builder was traveling from Chicago to Seattle when it left the tracks about 4 p.m. Federal investigators are seeking the cause of an Amtrak train derailment near a switch on tracks in the middle of vast farmland in far northern Montana that killed three people and left seven hospitalized over the weekend. The images showed sunny skies, and it appeared the accident occurred along a straight section of tracks.JOPLIN, Mont. Passengers were standing alongside the tracks, some carrying luggage. Photos posted to social media showed several cars on their sides. Speaking from the Liberty County Senior Center, where passengers were being taken, Vandervest said it felt like “extreme turbulence on a plane.”Īmtrak was working with the local authorities to transport injured passengers and safely evacuate all other passengers, Abrams added. She told the Times that the car behind hers was tilted over, the one behind that was entirely tipped over, and the three cars behind that “had completely fallen off the tracks and were detached from the train.” “My first thought was that we were derailing because, to be honest, I have anxiety and I had heard stories about trains derailing,” said Vandervest, who is from Minneapolis. Megan Vandervest, a passenger on the train who was going to visit a friend in Seattle, told The New York Times that she was awakened by the derailment. The train had about 147 passengers and 13 crew members onboard, Abrams said. The accident scene is about 150 miles (241 kilometers) north of Helena and about 30 miles (48 kilometers) from the border with Canada. near Joplin, a town of about 200, Amtrak spokesman Jason Abrams said in a statement. The Empire Builder train derailed at 4 p.m. Amtrak said in a statement that there were multiple injuries. At least three people were killed on Saturday afternoon when an Amtrak train that runs between Seattle and Chicago derailed in north-central Montana, an official with the Liberty County Sheriff's Office said.ĭispatcher Starr Tyler told The Associated Press that three people died in the derailment.
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