CHESTER, Pa. — It happened so fast, Kim Goldman had barely settled in for her ride from Philadelphia to Washington.
Amtrak Train 89 was cruising south along a row of refineries near the Delaware border, some of its 341 passengers dozing, others nursing cups of coffee — until a boom, a wall of fire and yellow smoke stirred terror just before 8 a.m. Sunday.
Barely 20 minutes after departing Philadelphia, the Georgia-bound train struck an Amtrak maintenance vehicle and derailed, killing two people, injuring 35 others, and creating a scene of confusion and fear less than a year after another Philadelphia-area Amtrak crash that killed eight people and injured hundreds.
“I was scared that we were going to turn over,” said Goldman, 26, a fundraiser for Defenders of Wildlife in Washington. Her car — the one right behind the engine — filled with smoke after the 7:53 a.m. collision.
“Someone’s coffee flew and hit me,” said Keith Kelly, 46, of Brooklyn, in the next car over. “People were screaming. There were also children crying.”
Another passenger described “a crash and then a wall of fire outside the window.”
The chaos arrived with hardly any warning.
“The engineer honked the horn, then two seconds later we felt the impact,” Kelly said. “We saw flames on the right side of the train. I could feel the car shimmying.”
Some people were so terrified that they jumped off the train, only to be coaxed back inside by Amtrak conductors who managed to restore and maintain calm while emergency vehicles rushed to the scene.
Fire marshals, police, emergency medical crews and firefighters from Chester and other industrial towns south of Philadelphia International Airport rushed to the scene.
It was not immediately clear how fast the train was traveling upon impact. Investigators did not explain how or why a maintenance vehicle could be in the path of a train on Amtrak’s high-traffic Northeast Corridor.
The train derailed in an industrial pocket of Delaware County, near the Pennsylvania border with Delaware.
The morning of the crash was so blustery and cold that residents paid more mind to the sound of creaking wood in their homes and said they did not hear a crash.
One woman who could see the stalled engine from her bedroom window had heard nothing until the blare of emergency vehicles.
“The wind was so loud. A lot of wind — and a whole lot of sirens,” said Nichole Stock, 32, who was in bed when she jumped up to look out her second-floor window along the tracks.
Emergency vehicles were rushing onto a patch of land alongside the stalled train. Minutes later, she saw passengers walk off the train, in most cases with no assistance.
“Most of them walked off with their luggage,” said Stock, whose home is adjacent to the northbound tracks in Trainer, the town just south of Chester where the Amtrak train came to a rest.
From there, passengers walked to nearby Trainer United Methodist Church, where they wrapped themselves in Red Cross blankets.
They either waited for buses to take them to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia or made other arrangements to reach their destinations from there.
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