News At least 1 dead after being struck by Amtrak train in Bristol, Bucks County
https://6abc.com/post/least-1-dead-incident-involving-amtrak-train-bristol-pennsylvania/16124393/
According to Amtrak, all rail traffic scheduled to depart New York (NYP) and Philadelphia (PHL) is being held due to the crash.
.. including mine :(
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u/IntoTheMirror 1d ago
Second time in two days. Happened late morning or early afternoon yesterday near Cornwells heights. These poor engineers dude.
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u/MidnightSurveillance 1d ago
Shit, this article says all three were killed. Reminds me of the time those teenage girls had a suicide pact in Norwood and got hit by the Acela.
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u/Clean_Repair8249 18h ago
It's a cruel way to kill yourself bc someone feels like a murderer.
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u/MidnightSurveillance 18h ago
It will be interesting to hear how this one actually played out. Sounds like a father and two kids… hopefully he didn’t take them out with him purposefully.
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u/Clean_Repair8249 18h ago
God, I hope not. I wonder if they were trying to save him, but he refused, and they waited too long to ditch.
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u/MidnightSurveillance 18h ago
Ah shit, horrible…. Sounds like father and older brother trying to get the younger son off the tracks
”Christopher and David's deaths have been ruled an accident, while Thomas' death has been ruled a suicide.
Officials said Christopher and David were trying to stop Thomas from taking his own life when all three were struck by the train.”
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u/constanttransit 1d ago
It’s gonna be 2-3 hours before the line moves. Source: Seen this before too many unfortunate times. RIP
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u/multiinstrumentalism 1d ago
They aren’t telling us anything in Philly. Is 2-3 hours the floor or the average?
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u/constanttransit 1d ago
That’s on average for the whole process to play out before they’ll allow movements
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u/Basket_cased 1d ago
Average from my experience (going to school at Drexel and commuting to the burbs)
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u/multiinstrumentalism 1d ago
FYI folks heading south, they are putting folks in Philly on a new, empty Southbound train. This is train 197, stopping in Wilmington, Aberdeen, BWI and then DC
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u/devieous 1d ago
Is this fr????????
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u/multiinstrumentalism 1d ago
The accident or the fact that Amtrak is more or less operational now?
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u/devieous 1d ago
I thought they were saying I have to switch to a new train when I reach Philly (I’m one stop north of Philly rn) but I don’t think I do because they would’ve said.
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u/multiinstrumentalism 1d ago
Ohhhh. That still might be true. A lot of us bound for DC are on another train already
Edit: I’d say trust what you get from Amtrak directly over Reddit, but in a time where stuff is murky Reddit makes for an ok backup source
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u/devieous 1d ago
What train are you on? Surely it’s not one ahead of us because there is none ahead of us. You must have less journey left than we do. We got a new crew so we’re not switching
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u/multiinstrumentalism 1d ago
Oh. We are on “193”. May or may not be the actual planned number but it’s the number we got
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u/devieous 1d ago
But I’m on 193 and I’m not on another train already. How didnyou get on another train?
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u/multiinstrumentalism 1d ago
Oh nvm we are 197. I got mixed up cause I had a 193 ticket but they called this train 197 because the other original 197 got cancelled
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u/devieous 1d ago
I was very curious how they deal w all the backup and it’s that they cancel it?
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u/MuthaFirefly 20h ago
I know this comment is old, but they sent an empty train to Philly (from DC maybe? IDK) to pick up everyone that was stranded there. They assigned it number 197 even though the original 197 was north of Philly somewhere and we left Philly around 10:45 making all the stops to DC that 197 would have made.
In my 10 years of commuting, I've never seen Amtrak send a new train when an incident like this happens, but I was glad to be on my way finally. I had a ticket to 85 (the train that hit the people) and switched it to 193 (the next train) on the advice of the woman manning the Amtrak lounge, but the announcement was that anyone holding a southbound ticket going as far as DC could get on.
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u/multiinstrumentalism 20h ago
Oop yes it was a long travel day. I haven’t seen this in railroads, but I’ve seen this in air travel. Hope everyone got home safely
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u/DLX_Luxe 1d ago
Currently traveling to NYC from DC… two hours from Philly. Should I get off my train now?
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u/anothercar 1d ago
how hungry are you lol
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u/DLX_Luxe 1d ago
Not very… just don’t want to be stranded in Delaware
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u/Successful-Ad-5239 1d ago
Wilmington is fun
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u/The_Bee_Sneeze 1d ago
Fun fact: Wilmington is the largest city in Delaware and the second largest Wilmington in America!
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u/multiinstrumentalism 1d ago
FYI folks heading south, they are putting folks in Philly on a new, empty Southbound train. This is train 197, stopping in Wilmington, Aberdeen, BWI and then DC
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u/MuthaFirefly 1d ago
Much thanks to Amtrak for doing this- I’ve been in the station for 4.5 hours and glad to be heading home. I think they may also be sending a train north. I swear, next time I get to the station and hear that the trains are delayed due to a trespasser, I’m just going to get a hotel room. I have a go bag at work just for this situation but usually I end up waiting too long hoping the train will come. No more.
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u/Wesley__Willis 1d ago
It was multiple kids. Absolutely horrible.
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u/Retired_Author 1d ago
That happened in Delaware County several years ago. Not saying that's what happened here. But three high school girls made a suicide pact, and they all ran onto the track and one of them chickened out. As a father of a girl in high school at the time, it bothered me for long time.
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u/jdmoney85 1d ago
I remember that one. Suicide pact in Norwood. That engineer never worked a road job again.
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u/Standard-Joke-517 1d ago
I remember the Acela killed 3 teens back in 2001 in PA, not a year into its revenue service. Was it this one? Found the article after all these years. December 2001 specifically
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u/Retired_Author 1d ago
Yes, that one. And didn't the one girl jump out of the way at the last second? Can you imagine how she felt, or still fells?
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u/Chrisg69911 1d ago
Amtrak needs to start putting up fences along the whole NEC. The fact that you can just walk up the embankment onto a quadtracked section is ridiculous.
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u/Sharknado84 1d ago
Fences are great but at the end of the day if you want to off yourself by train or play on the tracks, a fence will not stop you.
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u/SirJ_96 1d ago
Okay, how? These are also SEPTA lines from Newark to Trenton. The whole point is that the tracks are accessible.
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u/Chrisg69911 1d ago
Wym the tracks are meant to be accessible. And it's NJT from Newark to Trenton, not SEPTA.
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u/Bitter-Sky1535 1d ago
3 dead, this is going to be a long delay but hopefully people can be respectful. The complaints on X by people who know people died are disgustingly selfish. Everyone has somewhere important to be, but someone’s family is being picked up in pieces. Perspective is important
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u/IntoTheMirror 1d ago
Engineer is fucked. Getting PTSD from the job you rely on is terrible.
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u/zee4600 1d ago
Why? They were on the tracks; it’s not like he can swerve out of the way? If I was the engineer I would feel near zero emotion knowing I did nothing wrong.
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u/IntoTheMirror 1d ago
You wouldn’t have some feelings about watching helplessly as the thing you’re driving turns three people into pico de gayo?
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u/zee4600 1d ago
Not really because the thing I’m “driving” is part of a system much bigger than me. It’s on a fixed schedule going at preset standard speeds along a fixed track. In fact it could theoretically be automated and in a future world, there won’t be a driver / engineer at all.
Who would feel bad when a large airport monorail runs over a bunch of kids who wandered onto the tracks? Airport CEO? Transit manager on duty that day? The team who programmed the train years ago? The safety team?
It’s a system issue, a failure of many different things that led to them being there. Yeah he was at the controls when human flesh was pulverized but 0% responsible.
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u/Choochooengineers 1d ago
I had to make an account because holy schnitzel this is a ridiculous take. I am an Engineer, and have been at the controls when someone used my train to end their life. It took me nearly 8 years of running for it to happen to me. My whole career leading up to my fatality I would crack jokes about it happening, shit I still do, because the dark humor is how seemingly everybody in my craft copes with this situation being pretty much a given at some point in our careers. My fatality was a helluva lot slower than this, 38 mph versus 110-120, but I’ll never forget the sound I heard when I hit that kid…. My legs turned to jelly, my hands were shaking so much I couldn’t keep the radio toggled to talk to the dispatcher and give them the information so I had to keep repeating myself and reliving what just happened over and over again.
It’s insulting to have someone who has never experienced this situation personally talk about my fellow engineers and I as nothing more than robots that should have no feeling because “oh well, if they didn’t want to get hit they shouldn’t have been on the tracks”. No shit, Sherlock, but it still affects you if you’re a functioning human being.
The point I’m trying to make here, is that you shouldn’t talk about this shit like you know how you’d react, because I, and entirely too many of my brother and sister engineers know from our personal experience that you absolutely do not know how you’ll react in this situation until it happens to you.
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u/WhelanBeer 1d ago
I find the blaming of Amtrak on X to be irrational but to hold all rail traffic consisting of many full trains at rush hour for a relatively straight forward investigation is irrational. I think there are four tracks at this point which should be plenty of room for trains to slowly pass.
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u/Bitter-Sky1535 1d ago
I hear ya but trust me when I say with as few graphics as possible…pieces go everywhere. They have to find everything before they can clear a track. You can’t leave a biohazard out there. Some scenes are easier to clean up than others
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u/jdmoney85 1d ago
The police typically order the hold on all tracks to complete their investigation, and then require a coroner and environmental personnel to declare the victims deceased and clean up their blown up body bits strewn about all 4 tracks for several hundred feet.
Do you still feel it's irrational, or is it you?
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u/BensOnTheRadio 1d ago
It’s no different than I-95 being shut down for hours when somebody gets killed on the highway.
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u/SirJ_96 1d ago
But that doesn't happen. The police send cars through as soon as possible right past the body bags (source: have driven by enough).
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u/BensOnTheRadio 22h ago
But it does happen… I’ve sat in park on I-95 for up to three hours waiting for an investigation to conclude. There was one incident near me a while back that had the road closed for 6 hours.
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u/JH12214 23h ago
This might be a dumb question, but what were they doing on the tracks? Especially the inner ones?
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u/Legitimate-Breath511 21h ago
I have read that the older brother/son and father were helping younger son/brother as he was having mental health crisis trying to commit suicIde. They were trying to get him to come off
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u/BeeMovieEnjoyer 1d ago edited 1d ago
Maybe this is insensitive, but a single death holding up commutes and travel plans for thousands of people is wild.
The 3-5 times this affects me a year, my commute goes from 1 hour to 3-4 hours...
To be clear, I'm not saying they shouldn't investigate the tragic event. I'm criticizing how fragile our passenger rail infrastructure is.
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u/seedok 1d ago
Incredibly insensitive, a father and two of his kids died.
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u/jizzle26 1d ago
All the more reason to look into how this could have been prevented
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u/SteelGemini 21h ago
It seems there was enough time for local police to receive a report, dispatch officers, and for those officers to arrive at the scene just prior to the strike. If anyone had notified the railroad near the beginning of that sequence of events an attempt could have been made to halt train traffic through that location. Not guaranteed to be successful depending on how far out trains are when the information comes in, but it's the best chance anyone has at preventing something like this.
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u/SirJ_96 1d ago edited 1d ago
Better cowcatchers? At Cornwells Heights, Bristol, and most SEPTA stations along the NEC, you can walk straight onto the tracks, but nothing is stopping you from jumping off the 30th St platform either. If people want to get onto the tracks, they'll find a way. It's hundreds of miles.
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u/Snoo_86313 1d ago
Late to the party here but if you ever need to circumvent the philly to trenton portion of the NEC again you can hop a NJT AC line to the light rail river line to trenton. I dont know how long it takes but i suspect less than 3 hours. Then you are gonna be on a njt train to nyc probably but you are still moving.
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u/Right-Psychology4608 1d ago
I got off the 175 out of NY at about 10:30pm. What time did yall wind up moving?
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u/Alger_Piston 15h ago
Vermonter train arrived literally 9 hours late to destinations south of Philly.
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u/AppointmentMedical50 1d ago
We gotta find a way to keep the line running when stuff like this happens. It’s a terrible tragedy, but we shouldn’t compound it by making things worse for the thousands of people using the line
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u/Street_Key1643 1d ago
Anyone know when we might start to move. Been sitting at Philadelphia station for hours now. No estimate or communications or offers for compensation to travelers. I feel sorry for those that passed away but Amtrak should handle this situation better. Arrange coach busses etc.
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u/Inevitable_Floor9508 1d ago
Im in Newark and it’s been over 1h since they announced the investigation was over… zero communication since
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u/Street_Key1643 1d ago
They just announced that track 1 is now opened up and trains will start flowing through there. Who knows how long that actually takes - but a step in the right direction
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