NEW YORK — In what was a near tragedy, a freight train crashed into a stuck truck on New York’s train tracks, and the driver is miraculously alive.
The 18 wheeler never had a chance because it stopped on the cross tracks new main street next to Route 9W in Haverstraw on Thursday morning. The CSX freight train was rolling down the track just before 9:30 a.m. when a witness saw the truck unable to move.
“A passerby who saw he was stuck on the tracks was passing and pointed out one of our sergeants who was on the road in another detail he said he was stuck on the tracks,” the captain said. Haverstraw Police, John Gould.
The officer came running up Route 9W and could hear the train behind him. He arrived just in time to get the driver out of the truck cab.
“The driver was in the cab of the truck on the phone trying to get help to come and help him out of the lanes and he didn’t listen,” Gould said.
Seconds later, the locomotive broke through, cutting the trailer in half before the engineer could stop it on the tracks. Fortunately, neither the conductor nor the crew members of the train were injured.
Loading hundreds (if not thousands) of titanium pipes heading for a power plant became a tangle of pick-up sticks that had to be collected and removed from the site.
There is a history of accidents at the Rockland County crossing in particular, but why? A nearby sign says it all: low ground clearance due to the steep slope of the street leading to the tracks.
Several years ago, a car transporter got stuck crossing the same tracks. The truck in this situation was also destroyed by a freight train, but again no one was killed in the accident and the truck driver was not injured.
A check of the federal railroad registry found 10 incidents at the crossing dating back to 1979, including two fatalities.
The train involved in Thursday’s incident was finally able to leave in the middle of the afternoon. Subsequent trains showed no significant track damage.