Train Jumps Track, Lands In Swamp

An Amtrak train carrying mail and 113 people jumped the track at 60 mph on Saturday, sideswiping another train as it landed in a swamp. Thirty-two people were injured.

The derailment disrupted rail service between Newark and New York City all day, with two tracks closed. Regular service was expected today.

The mail train sideswiped another Amtrak train as it derailed, but no one aboard the second train was hurt. Amtrak said 16 passengers and five employees aboard the mail train were treated for minor injuries and released from local hospitals. Two employees remained hospitalized for observation.

The train’s two locomotives, a mail car and three passenger cars derailed, Amtrak spokesman Rick Remington said. The train was en route from Washington to Boston with 88 passengers and 25 Amtrak employees.

Afterward, the cars lay in a zigzag pattern in the wetlands mud. Some passengers had to stand in knee-deep water for about 30 minutes before they were rescued.

Amtrak foreman Kenneth Waiters of Philadelphia, who was traveling to Connecticut with his wife to celebrate her birthday, said the accident was a blur.

“All I know is we were in a swamp,” said Waiters, 43. “I heard a loud thump and everything started going bumpy … and we were in a swamp. I thought I was dead.”

Waiters and his wife, Norma, were not seriously hurt and Secaucus Mayor Anthony Just credited the marshy crash site for minimizing injuries.

“The wetlands sponged it … it’s like a big cushion,” Just said.

The crash at about 6:30 a.m. came just after the 12-car Fast Mail train had crossed the Hackensack River Bridge in this northern New Jersey town about six miles west of New York City.

The sideswiped train, The Carolinian, was traveling from New York to Charlotte, N.C. Passengers on the southbound train had to change to another train in Newark, Remington said.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known, although the bridge at the scene had been worked on the night before.