Commuters adjust to life after derailment

Days before the one-year anniversary of the Metro-North derailment in Spuyten Duyvil, Wyldon Fishman waited to board a Manhattan-bound train via the Hudson Line. 

“The thing that makes me uncomfortable is when the trains go from side to side,” said Ms. Fishman, 64, a few minutes before her train arrived at the Riverdale station on West 259th Street. “It rocks — just the fact that I’m sitting down as a passenger and I feel it.”

Still, the jerky movements are not enough to deter Ms. Fishman, a Riverdale resident, from riding Metro-North trains. Neither is the Dec. 1, 2013 derailment near the Spuyten Duyvil station, in which a train from Poughkeepsie to Grand Central Terminal jumped the tracks. Four passengers were killed and at least 61 commuters injured.

“We all got used to the fact that they were going to go very slowly when nearing the curve after that,” Ms. Fishman said of the incident. “If I’m going to get panicked about something. It’s not going to be about going through the Spuyten Duyvil Station.”

In its report on the derailment, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found that Metro-North engineer William Rockefeller was going 82 mph the moments leading up to the crash. The federal agency, which investigates transportation accidents, stated as the train entered a curve with a 30 mph speed limit, it derailed.

Commuters said that since the incident, engineers have taken extra precaution by reducing the speed of the trains as they approach the sharp curve.

“It’s really slow,” added Larry Levine, who takes the train from the Riverdale Station to Manhattan to work every day. “It kind of lumbers from here to Spuyten Duyvil when the curve is near.” 

Pam Rodman, who takes the Metro-North on the weekends to Midtown, said that knowing the train’s derailment was not the result of defective rails or locomotive technologies helps alleviate any fears of boarding the train at the station near the accident site.