I’m Going Off the Rails On a Crazy Train
Monday, June 9, 2008 - around 3:00pm - somewhere under Arlington, Virginia
Just the other day, my roommate was talking about his daily trials and tribulations of taking the Metro every day to work and home. I said this was his fault for not being man enough to get a license (oh, and he has severe vertigo behind the wheel), and that in my moderate Metro use, I was talking with my friends Joel and Manuel and said I never encountered anything more than a delay of a few minutes. That changed Monday. I was on my way home from my volunteer gig at the Air & Space museum. Orange Line, just past Rosslyn, a mere three stops from home, lunch, and some much needed sleep. Then a very large squeal. It tore me away from the new (to me) Duffy song I really like. People in the train exchanged glances. "That wasn’t right," said the look on most people’s faces. The tourists didn’t seem to mind at first. But the squealing got louder, even as the train slowed. We stopped for a minute. We tried to move again. Very loud squealing, acrid smell of something burning, and a thin veil of smoke filled the car. A semi-panicked voice over the intercom said, essentially, something’s wrong, we don’t know what, so we’ll just sit here for a minute. I did the same thing the night my first car nearly exploded on the NJ Turnpike when I was 17. Looking at the car behind us (I was in the second car of the six-car train), you could see in the windows something right. A few minutes later, they confirmed that the third car of the train derailed.
Now, this wasn’t some Hollywood-style derailment. People weren’t screaming, fires weren’t raging, and pieces of Metro car weren’t flying through the tunnel in a Bruckheimer-style summer blockbuster thrilling explosion. It was a matter of inches, as the photo to the right shows. The cars became half-uncoupled, and the front wheel(s) of the third car jumped the track. But, if Thomas the Tank Engine has taught us anything (other than kids will watch just about anything no matter how intolerably boring it is), this is a big deal for trains. So the wait was on. The derailment happened around 2:45. The lights and, more importantly, the air conditioning went out a little after 3:00. About 3:30, Arlington County firefighters boarded the train to applause. Nothing was burning, no one was ailing, but they were there to save the day. Frankly, I was more excited that two just-off-duty Metro mechanics were on the train. I can use a fire extinguisher. They fix trains. I didn’t want to go far from them. We eventually got moved onto a "rescue" train, and I ended up above ground around 4:20pm. It was definitely a long trip home. But there was no panic in our car, no concern. Maybe it’s because we were still upright. Maybe it’s because there was no fire, no one hurt, no huge rattle. Even the folks in the derailed car seemed to be enjoying the adventure more than anything else. It didn’t look like this at all. Frankly, if someone had a bag of chips and a cooler full of beer, we would have likely stayed on the derailed train. Eventually, it would have reached a toasty temperature. But no worse than outside, which was somewhere around "surface of the sun" level of heat yesterday.
Because I am a news geek, I called work to give them a tip. I ended up getting a live interview on the 5pm show, and had some of my photos put on the news. Exciting times for me, especially since I make my living behind the cameras and I like it just fine there. I was even interviewed on my own show this morning, despite not really wanting to do it. My boss made me. At least I had a clean shirt on. I can’t embed video here, so just click this link.
For now, I’ll stick to driving. No one was hurt, and that’s what matters. Those tourists from Australia and field trippers from Arlington Science will have quite a story to tell. And so will I.
Title of this post comes from the song "Crazy Train" by Ozzy Osbourne.
