A female passenger was seriously injured Thursday after a dislodged crossing gate became wedged between the steel doors of a Metra train on Chicago’s South Side, a first-time “freak occurrence” on the commuter line, officials said.
The woman, who was standing in the vestibule between train cars, was hit by the door as it crumpled. She was taken in serious condition to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Chicago Fire Department spokesman Kevin MacGregor said.
“The impact of the arm on the door was significant,” said Judy Pardonnet, Metra spokeswoman. “Those are stainless-steel reinforced doors, and it caused it to bow toward her.”
The incident occurred about 7:30 a.m. along the Rock Island District Line from Joliet to Chicago. Inbound train No. 408 had just passed 95th Street and was moving about 30 m.p.h. when the crossing gate arm split the seam of a sliding train door.
A conductor who was in the damaged car saw what happened and called for the train operator to stop. Still, it took investigators a while to figure out how the gate became wedged in the door, Pardonnet said.
“It’s very much a freak occurrence,” she said. "It’s something that has never happened on our system before. I talked to people who have been with us for 30 years and they said they’ve never seen anything like it.&q
Wow… I hope the woman recovers completely from this.
Either the gate broke because a car struck it, or it broke for other reasons. I have seen a car strike a gate before. Over here at Gilbert Ave, gates get broken at least twice a year, because of impatient people. I have seen it a couple of times on the IHB, where Shawmut Avenue crosses the tracks at CP LaGrange. Everytime that I have seen it happen, the gate just breaks off whole, with minor damage to the car. If it bent, perhaps it was because someone went around the gates, and perhaps caught the end of the gate with their mirror, or other part of the car… I don’t know how the crossing is set up down there, so I am just guessing.
Nonetheless, “Freak” accident is a good description of it. It’s just one of those things… you know?
METRA must have some really flexible work rules if a “switch crew” was sent out to repair a crossing signal. I think the investigation will determine that the gate had to have some “help” to come down at the exact millisecond the door was in the right spot.
By all rights, it should have already been down if the train was in the crossing. More’s the question why it swung into the car - maybe somebody bumped it? You know they aren’t going to stick around to take credit for it…
IIRC, the gates are constructed to turn (probably so if they are hit, they’ll just pivot), but I don’t know the details…
The newer gates have a spring/hinge at the end to turn if a car/truck runs into it to lessen the chance of breaking the gate. The spring returns it parallel to the tracks. Older ones are fixed. Either way, it’s not supposed to be possible for this to happen without outside interference.
From the picture, you can tell the direction the train was traveling.
Somebody witnessed this from outside the train–and I suspect the witness hightailed it out of there after the damage had been done. The gate would have first hit the handrail, then the door on the right, pushing it inward slightly to the point where it could contact the gasket of the door on the left, causing it to crumple inward. I can’t see that happening unless something was actually holding the gate up against the train. Had the gate been bent or buckled prior to the incident it would have done more damage to the right door.
Something else to ponder: was this a cab car? (Car number beginning with “8”, the answer is Yes–otherwise, no) Since this was an inbound train, the cab car was leading–the first car to go past the gate. If so, the engineer should have seen the damaged gate, or possibly events leading up to it.
Wow, I’ve never heard of a crossing gate busting a door on Metra either. Hopefully they can figure out what caused it so events like this can be prevented in the future. I nearly saw a crossing gate get hit by a van in Berwyn yesterday.
Given the accident “at speed” going thru an interlocking that caused a derailment last year, and this freak occurrence, I’m getting a little phobic about the ex-CRIP commuter lines.
Are there any statistics available from METRA, or federally, or whatever, that show casualty and mortality rates among commuters?? - a.s.
What were the wind conditions in the area it the time…I have seen long crossing gates dance around quite a bit in gusty wind conditions. In areas that are under a real threat of Hurricane Force winds, one of the jobs Signal Maintainers must undertake when directed to do so is remove the gates from crossings in the affeced area. Once the gates have been removed, train traffic, if any, must stop and flag their way across the crossings until the gates have been reinstalled.
Crossing gates long enough to span a 6 to 8 lane street (3 or 4 lanes in each direction) are very long structures and have quite a sway radius.
(from prior post): “Crossing gates long enough to span a 6 to 8 lane street (3 or 4 lanes in each direction) are very long structures and have quite a sway radius.”
Golly, the choices that have to be made. Going further along the idea of protecting people from themselves, those street-width gates were supposed to make going around the gate impossible, which I guess ithey do. But is the blowback an increasing possibility that part of the gate will damage the train and perhaps its passengers?
Some days it just seems like no good deed goes unpunished. I hope I won’t be in this cynical mood for long, but it seems like that to me now. – a. s.
Good weather that evening–no winds that should have affected the gates that way. I’m not intimately familiar with the area, but 95th is a fairly busy corridor (U.S. 12 and 20), and could have some fairly long gates. A wind blowing this gate into the path of the train, however, would have to be easterly–highly unlikely at that strength.
What you are saying makes sense, except for the fact that being a heavily traveled street, someone would have, had to have seen a perptrator, if that was the case. In reference to the winds, according to NWS archives the winds were NE, with peak gusts at 22 mph. Not sure if that is enough to blow the gates that much, but, then the archives don’t indicate the time of the highest gusts either. The archives also give the “official” or O’Hare Airport reading, and where this accident happened is about 25 miles SSE of O’Hare, and things can vary considerably that far south.
The ex-RI crosses 95th at a slight angle at that point, and it’s 2 lanes of traffic each
