Rumbling, and Then Screams and Smoke Rising

He opened his eyes. The Hudson River was right there, framed by late-fall bare branches.

“I’m thinking I’m going into the water,” he said. “I was thinking of me, surviving.”

Others heard rumbling as the Metro-North train rounded the bend just before the Spuyten Duyvil station. Above the crash site, where Bronx residents were awakening to a cool, bright Sunday morning, it sounded like a screeching or a crunching, or a series of short booms.

“It was just the most awful sound I ever heard,” said Rebecca Sherman, 45, who lives in the area.

When residents rushed to look, they saw smoke rising from train cars that were resting on their sides between the tracks and the river, as if they had been swept from their tracks by a careless giant.

Inside the train, people were screaming. Some held onto cargo racks; others hugged their seats.

Mr. Russell’s car — the third from the back — had toppled onto its side and kept sliding. The windows had shattered, and gravel and dirt had poured in as if the train car were “a vacuum cleaner,” Mr. Russell recalled. All he could do was grip his seat and hope not to fall out.

Elsewhere on the train, Sharon Martin, 42, had been dozing when the crash awakened her. When the crash was finally over, the woman next to her was unconscious.

In Mr. Russell’s car, a woman two rows over had a gash above her eye. Another woman’s back and neck hurt. Bruises abounded. People began to break windows to get out.

“I’m thinking, ‘This is not good,’” recalled Mr. Russell, a New York police officer who regularly rides the early train for a Sunday part-time job as a security guard.

As the residents in the area watched in disbelief, firefighters arrived, and climbed onto the toppled cars and cut into them with chain saws. They lowered ladders into each car to pull passengers out. They removed part of a chain-link fence running along the tracks and handed passengers to ambulance workers waiting on the other side.

Broken glass was everywhere. The area was strewn with stunned passengers. A woman sat with her leg hanging at an unnatural angle. Several bodies were nearby, covered with white sheets.

Mr. Russell was taken to Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, where he was treated for back pain and released.

“You think you’re safe on the train,” said Mr. Russell, a father of two. “I know I’m going to be taking a car for a while.”

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