Passenger commuter train accident that killed four
On the morning of December 1, 2013, a Metro-North Railroad Hudson Line passenger train derailed near the Spuyten Duyvil station in the New York City borough of the Bronx. Four of the 115 passengers were killed and another 61 injured; the accident caused $9 million worth of damage. It was the deadliest train accident within New York City since a 1991 subway derailment in Manhattan, and the first accident in Metro-North's history to result in passenger fatalities. The additional $60 million in legal claims paid out as of 2020[ [update]] have also made it the costliest accident in Metro-North's history.
Early investigations found that the train had gone into the curve where it derailed at almost three times the posted speed limit. The engineer, William Rockefeller, later admitted that before reaching the curve he had gone into a "daze", a sort of highway hypnosis.
The leader of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) team investigating said it was likely that the accident would have been prevented had positive train control (PTC) been installed per a prior federal mandate requiring its installation by 2015. Due to a number of other recent accidents involving Metro-North trains and tracks, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) demanded improved safety measures, which Metro-North began implementing within a week of the accident.
In late 2014, almost a year after the accident, the NTSB released its final report on the accident. After reiterating its earlier conclusion that PTC would have prevented the accident entirely, it found the most direct cause was Rockefeller's inattention as the train entered the curve. There were other contributing factors. A medical examination following the accident diagnosed sleep apnea, which had hampered his ability to fully adjust his sleep patterns to the morning shift which he had begun working two weeks earlier. The report faulted both Metro-North for not screening its employees in sensitive positions for sleep disorders, and the FRA for not requiring railroads to do such screening.
Background.
The train involved in the accident was the second southbound Hudson Line train of the day, leaving Poughkeepsie, the line's northern terminus, at its scheduled departure time of 5:54 a.m. EST. It was powered by a GE P32AC-DM locomotive, capable of running on either diesel fuel or electricity from a third rail. Since Metro-North uses push-pull trains, it was situated at the northern, or rear, end of the train to minimize noise on the underground platforms at Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, its final destination, where it was scheduled to arrive at 7:43. It carried about 115 passengers.
Engineer William Rockefeller, a 15-year Metro-North veteran who had started as a clerk in the stationmaster's office at Grand Central and then spent 10 years as an engineer, was operating the train from the cab car, at the front of a consist of seven Bombardier-made Shoreliner passenger coaches, in a mix of Metro-North and Connecticut Department of Transportation livery, two of which were closed off and used only for deadheading by employees. He had recently begun working the morning shift after working afternoons, a change he later told investigators he had made reluctantly, requiring that he leave his home in Germantown, approximately north of Poughkeepsie, at 3:30 a.m. for work. To make sure he had adequate rest before his shift, he had gone to bed at 8:30 p.m. the night before following a nine-hour shift the preceding day. He had arrived at work on time after a 43-minute drive, after which he bought a cup of coffee and a hard roll, filled out paperwork and attended a standard safety briefing, followed by tests of the train's safety equipment. Another veteran employee, Michael Hermann, who in his limited time working with Rockefeller had praised the engineer's "very smooth" train handling to other Metro-North employees, was the conductor; his one assistant leaving Poughkeepsie was Maria Herbert, with whom he regularly worked.
Once underway in predawn darkness that gradually lightened to civil twilight, the train proceeded south along the two-track main line, also used by Amtrak for its Empire Service trains. From Poughkeepsie it continued through the mid- and lower Hudson Valley, often right next to the river. Under electromotor diesel power, it made all six of its scheduled stops in the upper, non-electrified portion of the Hudson Line in Dutchess, Putnam and Westchester counties without incident. After Croton-Harmon, the northern end of the line's electrification, where it picked up another assistant conductor, Chris Kelly, it was held up briefly. The next stop was Ossining, where it became an express, continuing under diesel power. Between Ossining and the last stop, Tarrytown, just after dawn, Hermann and Herbert swept toward the center of the train, where they met briefly. After Tarrytown, with the train running only a minute behind schedule, they began returning to opposite ends of the train, taking seat checks from any passengers who might have boarded there. They were positioning themselves for where Metro-North's rules required them to be, so Herbert could join Rockefeller in the cab and call out signals after the last stop, Harlem–125th Street. Hermann, in the rear deadhead car with what he estimated to be six other employees, including Kelly, whom he had instructed to do so as the train's light passenger load did not require a third conductor, began doing his paperwork for the trip and preparing for his next.
The train continued south over the next on a straight set of four tracks next to the river, all with third rails, past the four stations along the line in the city of Yonkers, a permanent speed restriction of through downtown was augmented by a temporary limit around Ludlow due to construction. South of that station the train entered the Bronx. About south of the Riverdale station, Rockefeller should have begun to slow the train down in anticipation of the curve immediately before Spuyten Duyvil station, below the Henry Hudson Bridge where the Harlem River Ship Canal flows into the Hudson across from the northern tip of Manhattan Island. Instead, he later said:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;I [don]'t know how to explain it ... it was sort of like I was dazed, you know, looking straight ahead, almost like mesmerized. And I don't know if anybody's ever experienced like driving a long period of time in a car and staring at the taillights in front of them, and you get almost like that hypnotic feeling staring straight ahead ... I was just staring straight ahead ... [it was] that hypnotized feeling, dazed, that's what I was [feeling].
It was interrupted when, he felt, "something wasn't right with [the train]." Linda Smith, of Newburgh, who had boarded the train at Beacon with her sister Donna to see a choral performance at Lincoln Center, recalled that although she, too, was not fully awake, something seemed wrong. "It was bumpy and just seemed really at that point I was aware of going very fast." In the cab, Rockefeller initiated an emergency application of the brakes in an attempt to slow the train down, but it was already taking the curve.
Accident.
At 7:19 a.m. the train derailed north of the Spuyten Duyvil station, north of Grand Central, just after it had passed the junction with the West Side Line's crossing over the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge, where Amtrak's trains split off to go to Penn Station. In her passenger car, Linda Smith recalled the train turning sideways as the bumps she had felt gave way to bounces and seat cushions flew through the air. "It was like a movie going on around me." Debris entered the cars through the broken windows. Joel Zaritsky, a dentist from LaGrangeville headed to a convention, said it was like "severe turbulence on an airplane."
In the rear deadhead car, Hermann first heard "a little bit of like a metallic rattling," which was by itself not an unusual sound, but it just sounded a little bit odd." He recalled to investigators a day later that "the next thing I know my car had kicked and I was thrown from the fourth seat or across the coach up to the ceiling ... I dropped down. I went back up again and I slammed into the ceiling and then I slammed down into the floor." In the front, Herbert was sitting in the passenger seat behind the cab when "I looked up just to do what I was doing and a split second [later] I'm tumbling on the floor ... I think I hit the ceiling several times. I didn't even have time to react or to think what I was doing."
When the train came to rest, Hermann, despite a head injury and some bruises, took charge and reported the derailment to the dispatcher. He then worked with Kelly to coordinate the passengers and the emergency responders. In the front Rockefeller, who was mostly uninjured, freed Herbert, who was conscious but had also suffered a head injury, from the seat cushions that had piled up on her. Seeing that Hermann and Kelley had taken charge of the situation, he remained with her until he was taken to a hospital to be examined.
All seven cars and the locomotive left the tracks. Those in the rear remained next to the tracks; in the front, the cab came to rest just short of the Harlem River. Rockefeller, largely unhurt, got out and began aiding passengers. Linda Smith was one of the 61 injured in the accident, after she became trapped under seat cushions and unable to move. Her sister, whom she was travelling with, was thrown from the train and was one of the four killed in the accident.
Fatalities.
Of the four killed, only one was found inside the train after the derailment; the other three were thrown from the train as it derailed. All had been sitting in the front three cars.
Effects.
Response.
The New York City Fire Department sent over 125 firefighters to the scene to assist in the rescue. EMS workers were delayed getting to some victims while they waited for the third rails to be de-energized. All service on the Hudson Line was suspended as a consequence of the accident. The nearby West Side Line was reopened to Amtrak trains by 3 p.m. Survivors were taken to a family resource center set up at nearby John F. Kennedy High School; after all passengers were accounted for, it was closed in the afternoon.
Service and repairs.
For the day of the accident, Metro-North suspended all service on the Hudson Line south of Croton-Harmon. The next day, the first regular business day back from the Thanksgiving holiday, it restored limited service as far south as Yonkers, three stations north of where the derailment occurred, with shuttle buses providing service to the Van Cortlandt Park—242nd Street subway station, the northern terminus of the 1 train into Manhattan. Shuttle bus service was initiated between the Tarrytown station on the Hudson Line and White Plains on the Harlem Line. Westchester County offered free parking for the duration of the disruption in the lot it operates at the Valhalla station north of White Plains.
Metro-North was not the only passenger railroad to experience service disruption. Amtrak, whose Empire Service trains follow the West Side Line tracks from the accident site to Penn Station, suspended all service between New York City and Albany that day, stranding college students and others relying on the train to return to school after the holiday. By the afternoon it had been restored, albeit with delays due to reduced speeds and activity in the accident area.
The disruption affected 26,000 people who commute to the city via the Hudson Line. Some commuters temporarily switched to buses, or drove themselves. Across the Hudson, Rockland County offered extra express bus service across the Tappan Zee Bridge to Tarrytown. Drivers noted a slight increase in traffic on the Saw Mill River Parkway as well.
The derailment caused $9 million in damage. MTA crews worked around the clock to remove the derailed cars and repair damage caused to the tracks when they left them. They spent the day after the crash replacing ballast and laying new concrete ties. By the evening of December 2 all the cars had been righted and restored to the track. They were taken to the Croton-Harmon and Highbridge yards, where the NTSB impounded them for further investigations. Crews siphoned of diesel fuel from the locomotive before removing it, then