Scores injured when freight car strikes train in Canton
By Jamie Vaznis and Milton Valencia, Globe Staff
CANTON -- A runaway freight car rammed into an MBTA train this evening, tossing rush-hour commuters from their seats and leaving 150 passengers and crew with injuries, most of them minor.
An alert engineer halted the train before impact, preventing what could have been far more serious injuries, officials said. The crash occurred about a half mile north of the Canton Junction station.
"We knew we were coming into Canton Junction and suddenly the train stopped," said Tony Phillips, a 42-year-old passenger who works for a Boston advertising firm and lives in Stoughton. "All the sudden, there was a bang, a huge explosion. People were screaming 'Oh my God, what happened?'"
Everyone on the train who was standing fell to the ground, Phillips said.
Dozens of emergency workers carried passengers and crewmembers away from the tracks on stretchers, rushing them to area hospitals. Nearby residents saw passengers walking through the adjacent woods with head injuries, some spouting blood, looking dazed. Although none of the injuries was life-threatening, the high volume of cuts, bruises, and neck and back injuries forced some of the hurt passengers to take a bus to the hospital when emergency workers from around the region ran out of ambulance space.
"The lady in front of me was thrown forward pretty hard and she broke her nose and had a serious cut to her face," said Terrence Jackson, a 43-year-old passenger from Brockton. "Everybody did their part. I helped in the woman in front of me. The passengers that were less injured or weren't injured helped people that were hurt."
MBTA Train No. 917 left Boston's South Station for Stoughton at 4:40 p.m. with 300 passengers. Sometime before 5:20, a freight car loaded with lumber that had been parked at a nearby yard, a few miles from the Canton Junction station, came loose. It rumbled some three miles, said Paul MacMillan, acting MBTA police chief.
"It was rolling by itself," MacMillan said. "It didn't have an engine on it."
CSX Transportation owns the freight car, but company spokesman Gary Sease said he does not yet know how it came loose from what he called a "customer location."
"We are cooperating fully with authorities to determine what happened," Sease said
