(The following article by Sharif Durhams and Mark Johnson was posted on the Charlotte Observer website on August 3.)
RALEIGH, N.C. — An Amtrak passenger train traveling from Charlotte struck a dump truck and derailed here Tuesday, killing two in the truck and sending 21 passengers to hospitals.
The collision occurred about 12:30 p.m. as the northbound Carolinian was making its daily run from Charlotte to New York, carrying 182 passengers and crew.
The collision derailed the train engine and four passenger cars, although none of the cars tipped over. Passengers felt a series of two or three hard bumps as the train left the tracks and ground to a halt. Drinks and food went flying. Children climbing around on the seats tumbled to the floor.
Alena Marshall, a Kings College student from Troy, was making her first train trip when she felt the bumps and watched the train tilt. The door to the car ahead slid open and she looked down the aisle to see that car jerk suddenly to the right as it jumped the tracks.
“Everybody started hollering,” said Marshall, who was going to visit her sister in New Jersey, “and they looked out the window and said, `There’s a big truck out there.’ ”
This train had stopped in Raleigh an hour behind schedule and was on its way to Richmond, Washington, D.C., and New York when it crashed.
Raleigh police spokesman Jim Sughrue said witnesses told police that the truck tried to cross the tracks, though lights were flashing, the gate was down and the train was blowing its horn.
The truck bed, filled with gravel, broke off and lay at the train crossing. The cab was pushed down the tracks, a witness said.
Passengers looked out and saw diesel fuel spewing from the severed dump truck.
“There was kind of a panic,” said Elisabeth Pascale, a 19-year-old UNC Chapel Hill student from Greensboro, “because people thought the train was going to blow up.”
The car Pascale was riding in was resting on top of the truck. Amtrak crew members asked passengers to stay in their seats, assuring them that diesel fuel was much less flammable than gasoline.
Passengers remained on the train for more than an hour, with no air conditioning, as rescue crews secured the area and arranged for buses to pick up the passengers. Inside the train, passengers checked on each other and shared cell phones. Some took photos of the wreck.
At least 21 people went to Raleigh hospitals, none with life-threatening injuries. Many had bruises, strained necks and other minor injuries from the sudden stop. At least nine were released.
Late in the day, police confirmed the names of the dead as driver Chris McCullough, 34, of Garner, and passenger Keith Spence, 33, of Raleigh.
Reginald Bagett, who said he was Spence’s brother-in-law, tried to get to the scene, frantically calling his brother-in-law by two-way radio on his cell phone. Police stopped him a couple hundred yards from the crash, but his co-worker had slipped past and was at the wreck.
“Have they found the bodies?” Bagett desperately asked over the radio.
Bagett was driving another dump truck, bringing a load of gravel for paving a parking lot. The two trucks had taken different routes from the quarry, and the truck McCullough was driving had stopped for lunch. When Bagett got to the site, the other truck wasn’t there. Soon Bagett’s wife called his cell phone to alert him about TV reports.
Amtrak officials didn’t expect to finish their investigation and clear the train from the four-lane road until at least midday today, police said.
North Carolina and South Carolina each have recorded between two and 14 fatalities a year in railroad-highway collisions over the past five years. Each state recorded a dozen fatalities in 2004.
In January a freight train hit a parked train in Graniteville, S.C., rupturing a chlorine tank. Nine people were killed by the gas, and 234 were injured. Two months earlier, a car trying to beat a freight train, also near Graniteville, was struck. Five people were killed