WASHINGTON, D.C. — An Amtrak passenger train derailed in Kensington yesterday, toppling six rail cars and tossing unsuspecting passengers from their seats and sleeper compartments, the Washington Post reported. Of the 176 people on board, 97 were treated at hospitals. Officials said six of them were seriously injured.
Moments before the accident, the engineer told officials, he saw track that had heaved to the side, Amtrak sources said last night. Extreme heat sometimes can cause such a condition, which railroaders call “heat kink.” The temperature in the region at the time of the accident was recorded at 96 degrees.
“We know it’s possible with continuous welded rail,” said Carol Carmody, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, which dispatched investigators to the scene. She said heat can cause “a slight mishap or buckling.” It could take months for the panel to identify the cause of the accident.
Investigators also will look at other factors, such as whether maintenance work was performed on the track in the last few days, Carmody said.
Amtrak officials said the train, an eastbound Capitol Limited made up of two engines and 13 cars, was traveling from Chicago to Washington via Pittsburgh when the accident occurred about 2 p.m. near Kensington’s Antiques Row, several blocks west of Connecticut Avenue.
Passengers were just gathering their possessions for their arrival in Washington when the train began rocking, witnesses said, and the cars rolled onto their sides. Many passengers were able to scramble from the cars unassisted; nearby workers and residents swarmed to the train to assist others on board, and more than 200 fire and rescue personnel arrived quickly.
Screams and shouts pierced the train. Children cried. Many passengers pulled off the rubber gaskets on the windows and climbed out, feet first, and scrambled away from the wreck. They carried their luggage and wore dazed expressions as they walked from the track bed. Others were pinned beneath bunks and collapsed seats and had to be pulled from the tumbled steel.
Carmody called the emergency response “remarkable.” Rescue workers and investigators were amazed that no one was killed.
“To get out of this without any fatalities is a miracle,” said Montgomery County Police Chief Charles A. Moose. “People were certainly bounced around and thrown around, but fortunately there was not any fire, and fortunately there was not any explosion.” The train did not spill its 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel, firefighters said.
Because the rail cars simply fell to their sides without a collision to twist the steel, the rescue was straightforward. The last passengers were pulled from the train within 90 minutes of the accident, and the atmosphere in the sweltering heat was calm.
The injured were taken to hospitals across the area; Montgomery County fire officials said nine people had been admitted by last night.
Sources close to the investigation said the train was going about 60 mph when the engineer said he saw a kink ahead in the track. He put the air brakes into an emergency stop but said he was still running at 56 mph when he hit the bent rail and the train’s steel wheels lost their contact with the running rails.
Event recorders have been recovered from each locomotive and will be used by investigators to determine speed and the engineer’s actions.
“It tilted to the left, then it tilted to the right, and then it just fell over,” said Tony Cooper, who was coming home to Washington after a trip to Chicago. Most of the passengers were caught off guard, and many, like Cooper, were in their compartments — which convert to sleeping accommodations on the long-distance train.
Helen Olson was thrown from her bunk and hit her head as the floor suddenly shifted to where the wall had been. Her husband, Bob, was hurled from his chair.
Gary Holtz, 48, from Saskatchewan, Canada, was looking out the window when he saw the car ahead leaning “way too far over.”
“I suddenly felt [the car] braking,” recalled Roman Czornij, a financial manager from Pittsburgh, who was traveling with his two teenage sons on their first train trip and their first visit to Washington. “Then it felt like we were on ice as the car skidded off the tracks onto the dirt. There was a grinding noise, and I was flying.”
As the train came to a stop in a ditch, he landed on his chest. The cars ahead had twisted off and were lying on their sides, leaving a gaping hole at the entrance. Like most of the other passengers in his car, Czornij had only minor bruises. As they clambered out of the car, Czornij and his sons found an elderly woman whose hand had gotten caught between two seats. “Her skin was peeled back so far that you could see the bone. She was shaking,” he said.
Kermitt Tyler, who lives near the track, said he heard a child screaming and ran to one of the cars where he found a small girl hanging from a window, with her leg caught inside the car. “I pushed the window out, and she turned her ankle,” Tyler said. “She fell into my arms, and I brought her up the hill.”
Neighborhood children pushed grocery carts filled with jugs of water to the dead-end street where rescue workers had set up a command center.
Lt. Harold Allen, a Montgomery County police spokesman, called the rescue effort “pretty difficult.” A thick stand of trees lines each side of the track bed — which lies at the bottom of a deep ravine — and the trees had to be secured so they wouldn’t topple, he said. The slope leading from the tree line to the track bed was slippery, he said.
The heat was yet another challenge. Medical workers monitored clusters of firefighters at the nearby Kensington fire station, checking their vital signs for evidence of heat exhaustion.
A record number of patients — 38 — rolled into the emergency room at Holy Cross Hospital, spokeswoman Eileen Cahill said. “We saw more patients today than we have in any previous disaster in Montgomery County,” she said.
The Red Cross converted the National Guard Armory in Kensington into an emergency station, where medical workers checked some passengers who were then directed onto buses bound for Union Station.
The train derailed just south of Beach Drive, about 70 feet from a neighborhood of homes on Plyers Mill Road. The area is known to railroaders as Rock Creek Dip.
“It looked like a toy train set that a kid had knocked over,” said Harrison Long, 23, of Kensington, who lives nearby and went to the scene to help.
Both locomotives stayed on the track, but six cars derailed and landed on their side while two others derailed but remained standing. One car decoupled completely.
“It looks like the hill had collapsed where the tracks are,” said Chris Fowler, 21, of Bethesda, who was walking to his job at Quality Discount Tire & Auto when he heard about the derailment and went to the scene. “It looked like the hill had just fallen out beneath it. . . . People were bleeding everywhere.”
He said firefighters threw luggage out of train cars, pulled passengers from windows and stuck ladders into the train doors. Fowler said they began moving the less seriously injured people to air-conditioned businesses on Howard Avenue.
Someone tied a rope from the tracks down the embankment, and rescue workers and volunteers used it to pull five-gallon bottles of water up the embankment for the passengers. A deli and grocery store provided paper cups and jugs of water.
The track is owned by CSX, the freight railroad, and used by Amtrak and MARC. About an hour before the accident, a freight train ran on the track without incident, CSX spokesman Gary Sease said.
The track was inspected visually on Sunday and no problems were detected, he said. The track’s last ultrasound test, designed to detect rail weakness, was in April and showed no abnormalities, he said.
The speed limit for the Capitol Limited train yesterday was 60 miles an hour. The railroad has restricted speed on its track elsewhere in the region in the last few weeks because of concerns that heat could buckle the rail.
Investigators are looking into the possibility that maintenance had been performed at the site in the days before the wreck. According to one source, a 25-mph limit had been imposed at the site for several days, but the speed limit was lifted Sunday.
CSX would not comment on whether it had imposed a speed restriction yesterday because of the heat.
In April, the engineer of an Amtrak Auto Train in Florida reported seeing misaligned track just seconds before his Virginia-bound train derailed, killing four passengers and injuring more than 160.
Amtrak derailments have increased 26 percent since 1997, said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), who suggested that yesterday’s accident coincides with a reduction in maintenance workers and safety inspectors and an increase in the length and weight of freight trains. “We have left Amtrak little alternative but to defer maintenance, cut employees and endanger the public,” Norton said. “We will continue to put our people in danger until we find a dedicated funding source for rail.”
Yesterday’s accident disrupted MARC service on the Brunswick line, which normally carries about 2,000 commuters. MARC officials used buses to ferry Brunswick passengers from the Shady Grove Metro station. Service will not resume on the Brunswick line this morning. Commuters can catch shuttle buses to the Shady Grove Metro station from MARC stations at Martinsburg, Duffields, Brunswick, Germantown, Point of Rocks and Monacacy.
CSX spokesman Sease said last night that it was unclear how long it will take to clear the damaged cars from the track and repair the rail bed.
Amtrak President David L. Gunn said the wreck leaves Amtrak in a serious bind for equipment. Gunn had said earlier that the corporation had barely enough of the double-deck Superliner cars, such as are used on the Capitol Limited, to keep the whole system running.
“We are in real trouble,” Gunn said, adding that Amtrak now doesn’t have enough rail cars to run all its long-distance service.