On this day in New York · December 1, 2013
The Curve at Spuyten Duyvil
A Metro-North engineer who'd switched to the early shift two weeks earlier drifted off at 82 miles an hour, and the curve at Spuyten Duyvil didn't forgive it.
The facts
- Date and time
- December 1, 2013, 7:19 a.m.
- Speed at the curve
- 82 mph in a 30 mph zone
- Toll
- 4 dead, 61 injured, out of 115 aboard
- Cause
- Engineer William Rockefeller's inattention, linked to undiagnosed severe sleep apnea
On the morning of December 1, 2013, a Metro-North Hudson Line train carrying 115 people left Poughkeepsie bound for Grand Central and never made the curve at Spuyten Duyvil, where the Harlem River meets the Hudson in the Bronx. The train hit the curve at 82 miles an hour, nearly three times the 30 mph limit, and derailed at 7:19 a.m., killing four passengers and injuring 61 more. The engineer, William Rockefeller, a 15-year Metro-North veteran, had recently rotated onto an earlier shift and told investigators he'd slipped into something like a trance at the controls. A post-crash exam found he had severe, undiagnosed sleep apnea. Federal investigators later concluded the wreck was entirely preventable, and that it was the fourth serious Metro-North accident in barely half a year.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
-
it was sort of like I was dazed, you know, looking straight ahead, almost like mesmerized.
William Rockefeller, the train's engineer, describing the moments before the derailment in his NTSB interview
Source: Wikipedia -
four serious accidents in less than seven months is simply unacceptable.
Joseph Szabo, Federal Railroad Administration director, in a letter to MTA chairman Thomas Prendergast two days after the crash
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The crash became the sharpest example of a rough year for the MTA's safety record and helped push Metro-North toward positive train control and sleep-disorder screening for engineers, the kind of speed-enforcement backstop that could have stopped this train before the curve ever mattered.
Sources
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