The accident: “Amazing Grace in the Bronx: Inside the … Train-Wreck Rescue”

Here is a fine article – with a birds-eye picture – on the rescue yesterday after the train derailment. I'm sure I've taken this route round trip at least 2,500 times, since I used to have a Manhattan office. I left Manhattan around 1,999.

The article is short, but lovely, so hit the link. It's off the Dail Beast website so If you read the comments, you will be treated to some idiotically stupid reader remarks. 

“It’s very hard to ask a civilian who was just involved in an accident to help us,” Ellson would recall. “They had just been involved in a very bad train accident, and now I’m saying, ‘I need your help, I need you to help people who are in worse shape.’ I asked everybody, ‘Listen, look at the people next to you, and if they need help, help them.’ And they did it.”

The response was all the more remarkable because of what all these people had just been through as the cars violently flipped onto one side, righted, then flipped onto the other side. The people on the higher side had been tossed onto those on the lower, and then all of them had been thrown back the other way in a jumble.

“You’d think people would want to just get out and run as far as they could, but people were very good,” Ellson said afterward. “It is amazing. One moment they’re riding the train, they’re coming or going to work and it’s Sunday morning, and the next moment their whole lives are tossed up in the air, and they’re not just a survivor, you’re asking them to help.”