NYC subway crews wrestle derailed train back on tracks, as crash disrupts service for second day

NEW YORK (AP) — In the cramped confines of a New York City subway tunnel, work crews labored to lift hulking rail cars back onto the tracks after two passenger trains collided and derailed, causing service disruptions that stretched into a second day Friday.

The low-speed crash left the trains blocking both the local and express tracks in the northbound direction, which means partial service can only be restored once the derailed train is out of the way, said Janno Lieber, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority chair, at briefing in front of the station Friday morning.

However, getting the last of the train’s 10 cars onto the rails is a complicated operation because of the subway tunnel’s low ceiling, said NYC Transit President Richard Davey.

“The final car of the passenger train that derailed, there’s no room, right?” Davey said. “This is a tunnel.”

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Transit workers are “literally lifting it a few inches, shimmying it over, lifting it a few, shimmying it over,” Davey said. “So that process takes a while.”

The crash happened at about 3 p.m. Thursday when a northbound 1 train carrying about 300 passengers was switching from the express track to the local track at the 96th Street station, MTA officials said. The 1 train collided with an out-of-service train with four workers on board. More than 20 people suffered minor injuries.

Davey said the passenger train had the green light to proceed Thursday but the disabled train did not. “As a result it bumped into the train,” he said. “Why we don’t know, that’s still under investigation.”

A team from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived in New York on Friday to try to investigate the cause of the collision. The out-of-service train had been was slowly moving north after someone pulled a number of emergency stop cords, and workers were on board to reset the brake cords, Davey said Thursday.

Officials said the vandalized train, whose wheels were damaged by the impact of the collision, will be removed after the passenger train is rerailed.

No time has been set for an NTSB briefing on the collision, an agency spokesperson said.

Derailments and crashes in the 119-year-old New York City subway system are rare. The worst crash in city subway history happened on Nov. 1, 1918, when a speeding train derailed in a sharply curved tunnel in Brooklyn, killing at least 93 people.

More recently, five people died on Aug. 28, 1991, when a 4 train derailed at Manhattan ‘s 14th Street Union Square station. That train’s motorman was found at fault for alcohol intoxication and served 10 years in prison for manslaughter.