NEW YORK — In what was a near-tragedy, a freight train crashed into a truck stuck on the railroad tracks in New York, and the driver is miraculously alive.
The 18 wheeler never had a chance as it stopped on the cross tracks New Main Street near the Route 9W in Haverstraw on Thursday morning. The CSX freight train was speeding down the track just before 9:30 am when a witness saw that the truck was unable to move.
“A passerby who saw he was stuck on the tracks walked by and flagged down one of our sergeants who was on the road in another detail, he said he was stuck on the tracks,” Haverstraw Police Capt. John Gould said.
The officer came running up Route 9W and could hear the train behind him. He arrived just in time to get the driver out of the cab of the truck.
“The driver was in the cab of the truck on the phone trying to arrange for help to come and help him off the tracks and he didn’t listen,” Gould said.
Seconds later, the locomotive broke through, cutting the trailer in half before the engineer could stop it on the tracks. Fortunately, neither the conductor nor the crew members of the train were injured.
The load of hundreds (if not thousands) of titanium pipe headed for a power plant became a tangled mess of pick-up sticks that had to be corralled and removed from the site.
There’s a history of crashes at the Rockland County railroad crossing in particular, but why? A nearby sign says it all: Low ground clearance due to the steep grade of the street leading up to the tracks.
Several years ago, a car carrier got stuck crossing the same tracks. The truck in that situation was also wrecked by a freight train, but once again, no one was killed in the crash and the truck driver was unharmed.
A federal rail log check found 10 incidents at the crossing dating back to 1979, two of which were fatal.
The train in the incident on Thursday was finally able to leave in mid-afternoon. The trains that followed showed that there was no significant damage to the tracks.
