Emergency personnel walk near the scene of a deadly train wreck in Philadelphia
The Amtrak passenger train that crashed in Philadelphia, killing at least seven people, was hurtling at 170 kph before it ran off the rails along a sharp curve where the speed limit drops to just 80 kph, federal investigators said Wednesday (yesterday, Macau time).
It was the deadliest U.S. train accident in nearly seven years. It happened along Amtrak’s busy Northeast Corridor, between Washington and Boston, where the national passenger railway carries 11.6 million passengers a year.
The train’s engineer applied the emergency brakes moments before the crash but slowed the train to only 164 kph by the time the locomotive’s black box stopped recording data, said Robert Sumwalt, of the National Transportation Safety Board. The speed limit just before the bend is 128 kph, he said.
The engineer, whose name was not released, refused to give a statement to law enforcement and left a police precinct with a lawyer, police said. Sumwalt said federal accident investigators want to talk to him but will give him a day or two to recover from the shock of the accident.
Mayor Michael Nutter said there was “no way in the world” the engineer should have been going that fast into the curve.
“Clearly he was reckless and irresponsible in his actions,” Nutter told CNN. “I don’t know what was going on with him, I don’t know what was going on in the cab, but there’s really no excuse that could be offered.”
More than 200 people aboard the Washington-to-New York train were injured in the wreck, which happened in a decayed industrial neighborhood not far from the Delaware River just before 9:30 p.m. Tuesday. Passengers crawled out the windows of the torn and toppled rail cars in the darkness and emerged dazed and bloody, many of them with broken bones and burns.
Amtrak suspended all service until further notice along the Philadelphia-to-New York stretch of the nation’s busiest rail corridor as investigators examined the wreckage and the tracks and gathered evidence. The shutdown snarled the commute and forced thousands of people to find other ways to reach their destinations.
The dead included an Associated Press employee, a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, a Wells Fargo executive, a college administrator and the CEO of an educational startup. At least 10 people remained hospitalized in critical condition. Geoff Mulvihill, Philadelphia, AP
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