By Mitch Dudek
Chicago Sun-Times
CHICAGO — There was a huge bang, a jolt and then Alex Graham saw a “wall of fire” outside the Amtrak train window that felt like an open oven.
Graham had been reading, while his mother, Anne, slept in the next seat when a semi-trailer struck their California-bound train in the Nevada desert.
The train slowed to a stop three-fourths of a mile down the track, and the doors opened. The impacted car was ablaze, and the sunny desert air filled with smoke.
“I helped get people out of the windows of the second story of the train car that got hit by the semi,” Graham, 18, of Fort Wayne, Ind., said. “They put their feet out the window and dangled and dropped and I tried to guide them to the ground. I also saw a lady try three times to get her legs out of the window, and I was yelling for her, but her legs went back in the window and I didn’t see them come out again. I’m hoping she got out some other way.”
Graham said confusion and chaos persisted until an assistant train conductor who was missing a pinky finger and bleeding profusely walked by, telling passengers to get away from the train.
“Everyone was kind of in a state of shock and panic,” Graham said.
He helped a man with a gushing head wound away from the train and assisted a little boy in search of his mother.
“Everything happened so fast. It felt like time got warped. But I’d guess we were out there in the middle of the desert for 30 minutes until ambulances arrived . . . It felt like a movie,” said Graham, who just graduated from high school and was traveling with his mother to visit his uncle who lives outside of Reno.
When the collision occured, Graham was reading a book called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
“The author was talking about how you have the ability to choose your reaction to the situation,” Graham said. “Whether it be a positive or negative reaction, you decide whether you’re going to react . . . it was an odd coincidence.”
Graham, who boarded the train in Chicago on Wednesday, said flooding along the Missouri River delayed the trip for a few hours. “If not for the flood, we wouldn’t have been hit by the semi . . . maybe it’s part of some plan, but I’m just happy to be alive. It was crazy.”
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