New York Derailment Kills 4

The southbound Metro-North Railroad train was carrying about 150 passengers when it derailed around 7:20 a.m. in the Bronx, just north of Manhattan at an inlet where the Hudson and Harlem rivers meet. All seven passenger cars and the diesel locomotive derailed, scattering cars just to the edge of the water. Two cars flipped onto their sides, officials said.

The victims were identified as James Lovell, 58 years old, of Cold Spring, N.Y.; Donna F. Smith, 54, of Newburgh, N.Y.; James Ferrari, 59, of Montrose, N.Y.; and Kisook Ahn, 35, of Queens.

The engineer, William Rockefeller Jr., a veteran of roughly 20 years at Metro-North, was being treated for injuries at a New York hospital. He couldn't be reached for comment. Union officials said he had an excellent reputation. National Transportation Safety Board officials declined to comment on the question of whether Mr. Rockefeller applied brakes.

The fatalities were the first passenger deaths in the 30-year history of the railroad, one of the nation's busiest commuter-rail operations and a critical link between New York City and its northern suburbs. Metro-North was formed in 1983 when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority—which operates the Long Island Rail Road, the New York subway, and a system of bridges and tunnels—took over the failing passenger operations of Conrail.

Metro-North moves an average of 286,000 daily passengers across its entire system, and the Hudson Line involved in the derailment carries about 18,000 people into the city during an average morning rush hour.

The derailment occurred just as the train was negotiating a sharp curve, a stretch of track where the speed limit drops from 70 mph to 30 mph. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday investigators would focus on the train's speed, whether the train had any equipment failures and whether its operator did anything wrong. He said the track itself "appeared fine."

"We're looking more towards the operation of the vehicle and the speed of the train, and that can either be an equipment failure or it can be an operator error," Mr. Cuomo said. "We don't really know at this time."

An NTSB member said officials didn't know the train's speed before it derailed but expect evidence recovered at the scene will provide answers.

Earl Weener, an NTSB board member, said the train's event recorder—similar to an airplane's black box—was found at the site near the Spuyten Duyvil station in the Bronx. "We don't know what the train's speed was. We'll learn that from the vehicle event recorders," he said at a news conference Sunday.

Asked whether faulty brakes or the diesel locomotive's position at the rear of the train were factors in the crash, Mr. Weener said: "We don't know at this point. We'll be looking at it."

The path of the derailed cars and their distance from the tracks also suggested the train was moving too fast for the sharp turn at Spuyten Duyvil, one of the people familiar with the investigation said. The train should have slowed significantly before entering the 30 mph zone, the people said, but, for reasons not yet clear, the engineer didn't adequately slow the train.

"No one can figure out, really, what happened to the engineer, but he did not brake the train," one of those familiar with the investigation said.

The possibility that train speed was a factor seemed likely to revive debate over sophisticated anticrash systems Metro-North and other railroads must install by 2015, according to federal law. Metro-North is among the commuter systems that have told federal regulators they won't meet the 2015 deadline.

Whether one of those systems, known collectively as positive train control, would have prevented Sunday's crash won't be known until an investigation is complete. But one primary feature of the systems is a computer network that can automatically slow or stop trains if they approach dangerous sections of track too quickly.

The MTA board approved spending $210 million to begin designing Metro-North's positive train control system last month.

The derailment is the second major crash in a year for Metro-North, coming about seven months after a crash in Bridgeport, Conn., that injured 76 people. That derailment triggered a continuing federal investigation into the maintenance of tracks that Metro-North shares with Amtrak on the Northeast Corridor, the busiest passenger-rail corridor in the nation. Sunday's accident came four months after a freight train derailed last summer on a nearby stretch of track, but the rails there weren't under any safety restrictions.

In Sunday's crash, two of the train's cars were flung on their sides in a small wooded area near the inlet, with the lead car stopping just short of the water. Police divers and cadaver teams searched the waters next to the tracks but found no additional victims, officials said.

Some riders said the train appeared to approach the sharp turn quickly. Emilie Miyauchi, 28, was in the front car of the train, traveling from Ossining to New York City for a yoga class. "The train was going like pretty fast, and as it was turning the corner it just felt like it was going like out of control," she said. "It started to like speed up and feel a little out of control, like one or two seconds before it derailed."The train car fell to one side, and she smacked her head against the window. "I felt the window just disappear, and all this dirt came in, all this soil and branches," she said.

Ms. Miyauchi said she grabbed onto her seat to keep from being ejected.

After escaping the car, Ms. Miyauchi said, she tried to help a woman who had been ejected and was "under the train." Another woman nearby was covered in blood. "She was flung out of the car," Ms. Miyauchi said. "I used my yoga mat to cover her body."

Rescuers worked to stabilize the listing, toppled train cars, fire officials said. They used jacks to prop up train carriages as responders worked to free passengers stuck beneath seats and other parts of the train. They also used air bags to support trains as they tried to free pinned passengers.

A union official who represents Metro-North workers called the derailment "the worst thing I've seen in 38 years" working on the railroad. "The whole railroad's praying right now," said James Fahey, director of the executive board of the Association of Commuter Rail Employees and a train controller. "Everybody's upset about the deaths."