OXNARD, Calif. —A commuter train bound for Los Angeles derailed before dawn Tuesday in a fiery collision with a pickup truck abandoned by its driver after it got stuck on the tracks.
There was a loud boom and the screech of brakes before three of the train’s five cars toppled, injuring 28 people, four critically.
“It seemed like an eternity while we were flying around the train. Everything was flying,” said passenger Joel Bingham. “A brush of death definitely came over me.”
Lives likely were saved by passenger cars designed to absorb a crash that were purchased after a deadly collision a decade ago, Metrolink officials said. The four passenger cars remained largely intact, as did the locomotive.
Police found the disoriented driver of the demolished Ford F-450 pickup truck about a mile or two from the crossing, said Jason Benites, an assistant chief of the Oxnard Police Department.
The driver, Jose Alejandro Sanchez Ramirez, 54, of Yuma, Ariz., was arrested on suspicion of felony hit-and-run, Benites said at an afternoon news conference.
Sanchez Ramirez was hauling a trailer to deliver produce and told police he tried to turn right at an intersection but turned prematurely onto the tracks and got stuck. He was hospitalized for observation.
The crossing has been the scene of many collisions over the years.
The train, the first of the morning on the Ventura route, had just left its second stop of Oxnard on its way to downtown Los Angeles, about 65 miles away, when it struck the truck around 5:45 a.m. There were 48 passengers aboard and three crew members, who were all injured.
The engineer saw the abandoned vehicle and hit the brakes, but there wasn’t enough time to stop, Oxnard Fire Battalion Chief Sergio Martinez said.
Bingham said the lights went out when the train fell over. He was banged up from head to toe but managed to find an escape for himself and others where the train was resting above an indentation in the ground.
“I was just shaking,” he said. “I opened the window and told everybody, ‘Come to my voice.’ “
After such a crash killed 11 people and injured 180 others in Glendale in 2005, Metrolink invested heavily to buy passenger cars with collapsible bumpers and other features to absorb impact.
Metrolink spokesman Jeff Lustgarten said the Oxnard crash showed the technology worked.
“Safe to say it would have been much worse without it,” he said.
