BATON ROGUE, La. — Ray and JoAnn Lyons of Slidell still ride trains. The Falls family of Lakeland, Tenn., don’t know if they’ll ever take another train trip, according to the (Baton Rogue) Advocate.
Both families were trapped in the fiery dining car of Amtrak’s City of New Orleans after it derailed in Bourbonnais, Ill., on March 15, 1999.
The Lyons’ and Falls’ stories and those of other passengers and victims are told in vivid, chilling detail in A&E’s Minute by Minute: The Crash of Amtrak’s City of New Orleans. The program airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 25. (Cox Communications cable channel 38)
The retired Slidell couple had spent a week vacationing in Chicago before boarding the train for its 20-hour return trip to New Orleans. The well-traveled route follows the Mississippi River much of the way. The Falls’ trip had been to check out a college for their daughter Jennifer, then 18, who has Down syndrome.
The City of New Orleans was rolling along at a fast clip when it struck a semi-trailer truck at McKnight Crossing near the Birmingham Steel Co. The chain-reaction crash sent the train’s second engine into two parked freight cars, triggering an immediate fire, first in the sleeper car and eventually spreading to the dining car. One car after another hit the one preceding it and derailed.
Truck driver Aubrey Fosburgh was getting ready to pull out of Birmingham Steel when he heard the crash. He and the night crew of steel workers rushed to the scene with ladders and flashlights.
“The fire just kept coming towards us and towards us, and we were running out of room so we had to get out ourselves. There was still people in there when I got out.”
Steelworkers Bob Curwick and Jack Casey were in the dining car, working to free the trapped passengers.
“I remember feeling like I wasn’t going to die until they got my child out of there,” Susan Falls, whose right leg was crushed, recalled.
“I kept thinking, ‘Why won’t they leave?’ They (the rescuers) can get out of here.”
Casey felt differently.
“I said, ‘I won’t leave you,’ and I thought for sure we were going to die.”
Eventually, water from fire hoses reached the car and the Lyons and the Falls were able to be freed and taken to area hospitals.
Rainey and Lacey Lipscomb of Lake Cormorant, Miss., never made it to the hospital. The young sisters were on vacation with their mother Cindy, younger sister, Jessie Ann, and their grandmother. Also along was family friend, June Bonnin, daughter Ashley, and granddaughter, Jessica Tickle.
The girls were having a slumber party in the sleeper car when the train crashed. June Bonnin and Jessica Tickle also died.
Grieving mother Cindy Lipscomb remembered the plane ride home to Mississippi this way.
“I prayed ‘Dear God, please take this plane down on the way home.’ All I wanted to do was go to heaven that day with all my family and get it over with and not have to live and breathe and think or cry anymore.”
More than 100 were injured and 11 died in the accident. Felony indictments are pending against the driver of the truck, John Stokes, 58, whom the National Transportation Safety Board has determined was at fault.