NEW YORK — A New York City subway train derailed Thursday after colliding with another train at low speed, leaving more than 20 people with minor injuries and causing major service disruptions across Manhattan during the afternoon rush hour, authorities said.
At about 3 p.m. on the Upper West Side, a 1 train carrying about 300 passengers and an out-of-service Metropolitan Transportation Authority train with four workers on board hit each other near the 96th Street station, police and transit officials said at the scene. A “derailment” is when at least one wheel of a train leaves the track.
Photos posted on social media by city emergency management officials showed the passenger train partially off the tracks in an area that had a track-switching mechanism. Officials said there were no immediate signs of equipment failure and investigators were seeing if human error was involved.
“It was just really scary,” Evelyn Aguilar, 19, who was on her way home to Brooklyn, told the New York Daily News. “People’s belongings flew across the train. My head hit the window of the door. (Then) I hit my head on the pole.”
The out-of-service train had been stuck because someone pulled a number of emergency stop cords and the workers were on board to reset the brake cords, said Richard Davey, president of New York City transit for the MTA.
“Thankfully there were no serious injuries,” Davey said at a news conference. “Obviously two trains should not be bumping into one another. We are going to get to the bottom of that.”
The aging New York City subway system has struggled in recent years with power outages, signal problems and other breakdowns. The MTA has been facing a fiscal crisis in recent years, driven in part by lower ridership and revenues since the pandemic, though the state's most recent budget has helped the agency balance its books.
The collision knocked out service on the 1, 2 and 3 lines in most of Manhattan, the MTA said. Crews were working Thursday night to clear the tracks and hoping to get service resumed by Friday morning’s commute, but that was not guaranteed, officials said.
Firefighters helped remove passengers from the in-service train as well as a few hundred more people from another train that was not involved but had to stop in the tunnel because of the collision.
The NYPD said seven passengers and one crew member were taken to hospitals. At least 20 emergency vehicles were on the scene, including police, fire and MTA responders.
