VAUGHAN, Ont. — The fear is frozen in digital memory as a silver minivan bumps under a railway gate and the driver stamps on the brakes, according to the Globe and Mail.
He looks over his left shoulder, terrified, and sees a flash of green and white in the early-morning sun. Milliseconds later, the 6:15 a.m. GO train from nearby Bradford slams into him and his four passengers, killing them all.
The grisly scene was captured yesterday morning by coincidence. A locomotive that destroyed a small van in Vaughan, north of Toronto, was one of three GO engines equipped with a video camera in its nose. Footage from the camera helped investigators unravel what might otherwise have remained a mystery.
“You just see the driver turn his head and it was too late,” said James Mills, a special constable for GO Transit who was part of the team that reviewed the tape about three hours after the crash.
“They didn’t have an instant to think.”
Investigators from GO Transit, the Transportation Safety Board, and York Regional Police have pieced together the following chronology of the accident.
Five men, all believed to be between 25 and 30 years of age, had been driving a 2000 Dodge Caravan east along Rivermede Road, just east of Keele Avenue and north of Highway 7.
Shortly before 7 a.m., the driver appears to have ignored the flashing lights and ringing bells at a railway level crossing. The van hit the striped railway gate, and the light fibreglass barrier bounced upright.
An instant later, a southbound train travelling at 130 kilometres an hour rammed the front half of the driver’s side. The impact showered the crossing in plastic and metal fragments and hurled the vehicle into the air.
The van smashed through a hydro pole, tumbled into a deep ditch, and rolled to a stop upside down with its engine torn out and steaming.
Three bodies landed in the long grass of the railway embankment. Two were crumpled inside.
One of the train’s engineers made an emergency call and, less than 10 minutes later, Captain Bruce Rumble arrived with a dozen firefighters from a nearby station.
The area smelled of gasoline and radiator fluid. Concerned that drooping electrical wires might ignite the wreckage, the firefighters unrolled a water hose as a precaution.
They also carried their medical bags and defibrillator equipment down the tracks, but realized quickly that they were not needed.
“There was nothing we could do for these people,” Capt. Rumble said. All five victims were declared dead at the scene.
Their names were not released late yesterday, though police said they worked in the surrounding industrial area. The minivan was registered to an owner who lives above a shopping complex in uptown Toronto.
None of the 800 train passengers was hurt. Shuttle buses took the passengers to a subway station. Buses were also called to ferry about 2,000 passengers whose trains were blocked by the accident.
Officials said the videotape images were invaluable because they put to rest two rumours circulating at the accident site: that the gates had been upright when the van drove through, and that the driver was trying to weave around the barrier.
“We can see the value of the cameras,” said GO spokesman Edmund Shea, adding that GO plans to equip all 45 locomotives with cameras by the end of the year.
With no skid marks on the road and only a few scrapes on the railway barrier, York police Sergeant Brad Bulmer said the most significant evidence came from the train’s onboard data recorder and video camera.
“It [the van] entered the crossing while attempting to stop and actually stopped in the centre of the crossing,” Sgt. Bulmer said. “He stopped in the wrong place.”
Mike Thoms, 36, shook his head in disbelief as he watched the wrecked van being hauled out of the ditch and loaded onto a flatbed truck.
The welder had arrived at the crash site about 30 minutes after the collision, but at first he couldn’t identify the vehicle.
“It looked like a piece of rubble down there. Until we saw the wheels, we didn’t know what it was.”