By Kerry Burke and Evan Simko-Bednarski
New York Daily News
NEW YORK — Twenty-four people were hurt Thursday when a No. 1 train leaving the W. 96th St. and Broadway subway station jumped the track after a collision with another train, MTA and Fire Department officials said.
About 300 people were aboard one of the trains, while the other had been stalled as subway workers repaired vandalism, said MTA officials. Both trains were moving slowly when they collided, officials said, and none of the injuries were reported life-threatening.
Service was suspended along the bulk of the No. 1, 2 and 3 lines in Manhattan as a result during the evening rush hour.
“My hope is we will have service restored tomorrow for rush hour, but I cannot guarantee that,” NYC Transit President Richard Davey said.
The incident happened at the busy Upper West Side subway stop shortly after 3 p.m., with the crew of one of the trains reporting to the MTA’s control center that it “felt like (the train) was hit from behind,” transit sources told the Daily News.
Davey said the No. 1 train collided at low speed with another subway train taken out of service because several of its brake cords had been pulled. The vandalized train had four transit workers aboard. “They were trying to fix it,” Davey said.
The vandalized train had been taken out of service two local stops south, at W. 79th St., and was headed uptown on the local track on its way to the 240th St. Yard for repairs, transit sources said.
Uptown No. 1 trains were briefly routed off the local track via the express track so they could avoid the vandalized train — meaning they bypassed the W. 79th St. and W. 86th St. stations. Two passengers on the No. 1 during Thursday’s crash confirmed to The New York Daily News that the train had gone express before the incident.
North of W. 96th St., the Nos. 2 and 3 trains veer away from Broadway and head northeast into Harlem, while the No. 1 train continues its local journey northward up Broadway.
For the No. 1 train to go from the express tracks to its normal route on the local track, it would have had to pass over switches just north of W. 96th St. That is when it collided with the vandalized train, which was making its way to the W. 240th St. yard in the Bronx, a transit source told the Daily News.
“It was just really scary,” said Evelyn Aguilar, 19, a passenger on the No. 1 train who was on her way home to Brooklyn.
“People’s belongings flew across the train,” she said. “My head hit the window of the door. (Then) I hit my head on the pole.”
“It’s a miracle that no one was seriously injured,” she added.
“There was a sudden jolt forward, then a sudden jolt back,” said another passenger, Ava Stryker-Robbins, 17, who was in the No. 1 train’s first car. “We heard from (crew) walkie-talkies that there’d been a collision.”
“People were scared,” she added. “But most people were more concerned about getting to their destination.”
Several hundred passengers on a third train, stranded after power was cut, were also evacuated at W. 96th St.
Davey, the transit boss, said Thursday that the cause of the crash remained under investigation.
“At this point there’s nothing to suggest that it was equipment related — we will obviously look at human factors as well,” he said. “At this point, from what we can tell, the equipment was working as intended.”
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