Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia said five people were killed when a commuter train derailed outside the city late Tuesday night.

Multiple emergency units responded when the Amtrak train carrying at least 243 passengers and crew went off the tracks during a trip from Washington, D.C. to New York City. Nutter said six cars and the train’s engine were involved in the crash, which he described to reporters as an “absolute, disastrous mess.”  

More than 200 firefighters and police officers swarmed the darkened crash site with flashlights searching for any passengers who may be trapped in the wreckage. Television footage showed many passengers covered with blood. Six passengers were critically injured. 

One of the passengers, former U.S. Representative Patrick Murphy, took photos of the wreckage and rescue operations and sent them out via Twitter. 

Amtrak, the government-funded national passenger rail service, has cancelled service between Washington and New York. The National Transportation Safety Board said a team of investigators will arrive at the crash site Wednesday morning to begin a formal investigation. The Federal Railroad Administration said it was dispatching at least eight investigators to the scene.

Amtrak said the cause of the derailment was not known and that it also was investigating. It was bringing in lights to illuminate the scene overnight as workers examined the wreckage.

‘Like someone had slammed the brake’

The front of the train was going into a turn when it started to shake before coming to a sudden stop.

An Associated Press manager, Paul Cheung, was on the train and said he was watching Netflix when “the train started to decelerate, like someone had slammed the brake… Then suddenly you could see everything starting to shake,” he said. “You could see people’s stuff flying over me.”

Cheung said another passenger urged him to escape from the back of his car, which he did. He said he saw passengers trying to escape through the windows of cars tipped on their sides.

“The front of the train is really mangled,” he said. “It’s a complete wreck. The whole thing is like a pile of metal.’”

Gaby Rudy, an 18-year-old from Livingston, New Jersey, was headed home from George Washington University when the derailment occurred. She said she was nearly asleep when she suddenly felt the train “fall off the track.”

The next few minutes were filled with broken glass and smoke, said Rudy, who suffered minor injuries. “They told us we had to run away from the train in case another train came,” she said.

Another passenger, Daniel Wetrin, was among more than a dozen people taken to a nearby elementary school afterward.

“I think the fact that I walked off [the train] kind of made it even more surreal because a lot of people didn’t walk off,” he said. “I walked off as if, like, I was in a movie. There were people standing around, people with bloody faces. There were people, chairs, tables mangled about in the compartment… power cables all buckled down as you stepped off the train.”

Police swarming around Tuesday’s derailment site, in Port Richmond, a working-class area, told people to get back, away from the train.

Roads all around the crash site were blocked off. Hundreds of firefighters surrounded the train cars, taking people out.

The area where the derailment occurred is known as Frankford Junction and has a big curve. It’s not far from where one of the nation’s deadliest train accidents occurred: the 1943 derailment of The Congressional Limited, from Washington to New York, which killed 79 people.

Some material for this report came from the Associated Press.
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