Valhalla train crash
On the evening of February 3, 2015, a commuter train on Metro-North Railroad's Harlem Line struck a passenger car at a grade crossing on Commerce Street near Valhalla, New York, United States. Six people were killed and 15 others injured, seven severely. It is the deadliest crash in Metro-North's history, and was at the time the deadliest rail accident in the United States since the June 2009 Washington Metro train collision, which killed nine passengers and injured 80.
The crash occurred following a car accident on the adjacent Taconic State Parkway that caused traffic to be detoured onto local roads; the parkway had been closed in one direction. A sport utility vehicle driven by Ellen Brody of nearby Edgemont was waiting at the grade crossing. It was caught between the crossing's gates when they descended onto the rear of the SUV as the train approached from the south. Instead of backing into the space another driver had created for her, Brody drove forward onto the tracks. She died when the train struck her vehicle and pushed it down the tracks. The collision damaged over 450 feet of the third rail, which led to a fire and the deaths of five passengers.
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board focused on two issues in the accident: how the train passengers were killed, and why Brody went forward into the train's path. The board's 2017 final report determined the driver of the SUV to be the cause of the accident, after finding no defects with the vehicle or crossing equipment, or issues with the train engineer's performance. While it ruled out proposed explanations for Brody's behavior such as the placement of the SUV's gear shift lever, it could not offer any of its own. Despite the report's findings, lawsuits were filed against the town of Mount Pleasant, which maintains Commerce Street; Westchester County, the railroad; and the engineer. In 2024, a jury found the railroad and Brody liable for the accident.
Background
At about 5:30 p.m., 14 minutes after sunset on February 3, 2015, a vehicle traveling south along the Taconic State Parkway north of Valhalla, New York, in central Westchester County north of New York City, struck another vehicle making a turn onto Lakeview Avenue from the northbound parkway. Responding emergency services closed both southbound lanes and one northbound lane of the Taconic, where the highway closely parallels the two tracks of Metro-North Railroad's Harlem Line on its west. Drivers heading in both directions left the parkway, seeking alternate routes back to it on local surface roads.Traffic detoured onto Lakeview Avenue, which crosses the tracks at grade, and turned into the large Kensico Cemetery, a short distance to the west. The next grade crossing is Commerce Street, a lightly traveled local road to the north that intersects the tracks diagonally. It continues northwest through the cemetery for, then turns north again down a slight rise back over another grade crossing to a signal-controlled intersection with the parkway. After a crash at the Commerce Street crossing in 1984 that killed the driver of the van involved, a crossing gate had been installed.
Almost 15 minutes after the accident, at 5:44, Metro-North train No. 659 departed Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, south of Valhalla. It was an express train of eight cars, formed by four paired electric multiple units —all M7As made by Bombardier. The train was bound for the Southeast station, with Chappaqua its first scheduled stop. At the controls was Stephen Smalls, 32, a three-year Metro-North employee who had been an engineer for nine months.
Crash
At 6 p.m. Ellen Schaeffer Brody, 49, of Edgemont, finished her shift at a jewelry store in downtown Chappaqua. She drove her 2011 Mercedes-Benz ML350 SUV south in order to meet a potential client for her bookkeeping business in Scarsdale. Before leaving work, she had texted the client she was running late. This delay required her to deviate from her usual route home into an area she did not know well.Alan Brody called his wife at 6:11. During the call he gave her directions to Scarsdale, telling her to get off the Saw Mill River Parkway—her usual route south from Chappaqua—at the exit with the Taconic and follow it to the Bronx River Parkway. It could not be determined if she had the phone on speaker, which would have allowed her to keep both hands on the wheel. But according to Alan, the ML350 was equipped with software that automatically detected the phone if it was in the vehicle and put it on speaker. Alan did not believe she was familiar with both the area she was driving through, or with grade crossings.
The call was dropped at 6:19. Shortly afterwards Ellen apparently reached the site of the road accident at the Lakeview intersection, still closed, and took the detour. The National Transportation Safety Board later theorized she was hoping the accident would have been cleared enough to allow her to return to the southbound Taconic. She turned west, then north up Commerce Street, towards the intersection she had previously passed. Behind her was a vehicle driven by Rick Hope of Yorktown Heights, returning from his job in White Plains. He told the investigators that traffic was stop-and-go on Lakeview and Commerce. Both Hope and Brody stopped for a few seconds at the grade crossing.
At the grade crossing, train 659 was approaching on the western track. The crossing gates descended, warning lights began flashing and, according to Hope, bells began ringing. Hope said Brody's SUV was in front of the gate as it descended, but not on the tracks. The crossing gate struck the top of Brody's SUV before sliding down its rear and becoming stuck. Hope backed up to give her room to do the same. He instead saw Brody get out of the SUV and walk to the rear, apparently trying to free it. "She wasn't in a hurry at all, but she had to have known that a train was coming," he said.
Smalls, at the head of the train, told investigators he first noticed something reflecting light from within the crossing when it was ahead. He realized it was from a vehicle fouling the tracks, and immediately hit the emergency brakes and sounded the horn, earlier than he would have had the tracks been clear. Smalls hoped that the vehicle would hear it and leave since he knew he could not stop the train in time.
Collision
Brody then returned to her vehicle and, according to Hope, paused briefly. Then it moved forward, 30 seconds after the gate had come down on it. In the cab, Smalls saw the ML350 completely block the tracks when the train was one of its car lengths, or approximately, away, and braced for impact. The train, traveling at, struck the SUV on its passenger side at 6:26 p.m."There was a terrible crunching sound, and just like that, the car was gone," Hope said. "Disappeared. It happened instantly. There's no way she could have known what hit her."
Passengers in the train's first car recalled being thrown from their seats on impact as a fire started. One said that moments after being thrown into the next seat, he saw a section of the third rail go through the seat he had just been in. Efforts by passengers in the car behind them to assist them were unsuccessful as the door had been jammed and they had been unable to open it before smelling fuel and fumes. They abandoned that rescue effort for their own safety. Passengers further back in the train heard explosions. At the very rear, passengers said they felt only a small jolt.
The third rail sections lifted up and punctured the floor of the train's first car, with the first short segment remaining on the floor while later ones, with one exception that came through a different hole, accumulated atop the seats in the center of the compartment. A final one went up into the roof and punctured the second car at that point as well.
Investigators determined later that the fires in the first car were fueled by a combination of flaming debris from the third-rail cover, materials from Brody's ML350 and interior components of the train car. While none of the third rail components showed any sign of electrical arcing, there was some localized burn damage on some segments.
Due to disruptions in the railroad's electrical system created by the accident, the third rails were not completely de-energized immediately. Damage to a transition jumper isolated the rail on the eastern track south of the crossing from its counterpart on the western track north of the crossing. The former lost power within eight seconds of the collision. But circuit breakers that had detected that loss restored it to the last four cars of the train, which remained in contact with that rail. A manual override was sent from the office of Metro-North's power director at GCT a minute and a half afterwards.
Rescue efforts
Smalls went back into the burning train several times to rescue passengers. "He did everything he could," said Anthony Bottalico, head of Association of Commuter Rail Employees, the labor union which represents Metro-North workers. The train knocked Brody's SUV a distance of up the tracks, dislodging more than of the third rail, and breaking it into 13 segments, most of which accumulated in the front car's passenger compartment, and then into the second car. The New York Daily News reported that physical trauma from the third-rail segments was responsible for most of the deaths on the train; later the NTSB reported that four of the passenger fatalities, like Brody, died of blunt force trauma.The Valhalla volunteer fire department and ambulance corps responded; injured passengers were taken to nearby Westchester Medical Center. By the time firefighters reached the scene, the first train car was almost fully engulfed and thus there was little they could do to help evacuate it; most of the passengers had already managed to do so on their own. The firefighters were, however, able to suppress the fire before it could spread to the second car. To facilitate triage and busing evacuated passengers from the scene, the Taconic was closed in both directions at the intersection.