JAMES KEIVOM/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
National Transportation Safety Board member Earl F. Weener (center), addresses a news conference Monday about Sunday's fatal Metro-North derailment, while Sen. Charles Schumer (right) of New York and Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut listen. Weener said the board has yet to determine if it was human or equipment failure that caused the accident.
There were two red-and-white Mantis cranes near the train cars still on their sides between the tracks and the water, and a John Deere backhoe and MTA workers in white helmets and yellow-and-orange slickers, and Emergency Service Unit cops, the photographers and television cameramen shooting all of it from up above, behind the railings at Half-Moon Overlook.
This was the morning after the Sunday morning when four people died because the 5:54 Hudson Line train out of Poughkeepsie was nearly going three times as fast as it should have been as it made the sharp left turn at the Spuyten Duyvil station toward the Henry Hudson Bridge.
We don’t know yet why the engineer, reported to be a veteran of the MTA named William Rockefeller, was going faster than even the 70 mph allowed north of Spuyten Duyvil on the straightaway, the straight shot coming down the Hudson, or if he hit the brakes, what possible reason there was for a criminally high and criminally dangerous speed.
ERIC THAYER/REUTERS
Metro-North engineer William Rockefeller Jr. is carried into an ambulance after the train he was operating derailed in the Bronx, killing four and injuring more than 60 Sunday morning. The train was going at 82 mph on a curve where it should have been going at 30 mph, authorities said.
What we do not know yet, but will find out eventually, is if what we were really looking at was a crime scene down below Half-Moon Overlook, not merely an accident scene.
Maybe technology will tell us whether it was equipment or negligence that caused four people to die in this accident, one that makes all of us wonder, now that we find out that the 5:54 a.m. out of Poughkeepsie was going at 82 mph, how many dead bodies there would have been if this had happened Monday morning instead of Sunday.
Would it have been 50 dead? Or more? These are questions we ask ourselves before we get answers out of black boxes.
THEODORE PARISIENNE/ SPLASH NEWS
Authorities continue to work at the site of Sunday's fatal train derailment at the Spuyten Duyvil Station in the Bronx as two heavy duty cranes lift the cars and place them back on the tracks.
The worst train disaster in United States history is the Great Train Wreck of 1918, in Tennessee, 101 dead. Now this train, with cars that end up 60 feet off the tracks and nearly go into the water, comes into the Bronx at an insane speed and common sense alone tells you what happens if this happens at rush hour a day later, when there would have been 800 on board instead of the 150 the train had Sunday.
But even four lives lost this way is four too many. Here is what Gov. Cuomo said on the “Today” show Monday morning:
MARK LENNIHAN/AP
Cranes lift a derailed Metro North train car on Monday in the Bronx. Federal authorities began righting the cars as they started an exhaustive investigation into what caused the commuter train rounding a riverside curve to derail, killing four and injuring more than 60 people.
“I think it is going to be speed-related. It was a tricky turn in the system, but it has been a turn that has been there for decades.”
This was not a car suddenly going out of control on a rain-slicked road. This was a train above its own speed limit, the passengers on board trusting their safety and lives to the equipment the way people trust the equipment on airplanes, trusting their engineer, his train flying down along the water, the way we all trust pilots and co-pilots at 35,000 feet.
One of the officials early to the scene on Sunday morning told me this on Monday:
JOHN MINCHILLO/AP
Gov. Cuomo said on the 'Today' show Monday morning that the accident 'is going to be speed-related. It was a tricky turn in the system, but it has been a turn that has been there for decades.'
“The wreckage I saw down there was as scary as anything I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t help but think about how many times I’d been on that train myself.”
Anybody who rides trains into the city or out of the city, MTA trains from Poughkeepsie or Tarrytown or New Haven or Norwalk, who rides fast Acela Express trains to Philadelphia and Washington, knows this is what trains do: They go fast.
But this was a death train going too fast and now we need to know what the black boxes say about that, and what the engineer says, need to know why James Lovell, a father of four, and Kisook Ahn and Donna Smith and James Ferrari never made it to Grand Central Terminal Sunday morning.
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