parakkum

(Car loses.)

Caltrain 287 hit an unoccupied car this evening at the Ravenswood crossing in Menlo Park. As told to me by a coworker who was right there for the actual collision, the car skidded while crossing the tracks and nosed off the road, getting its front wheels stuck. Seeing that she couldn't move her car, the driver sensibly abandoned it and moved to the side of the tracks. A police officer who happened to be right there drove up onto the tracks behind the car and flashed his lights to warn the train.

When he realized the train wasn't going to stop in time, he backed his car off the tracks. The train hit the car with a solid thud (I heard this from the station platform) and punted it from the northbound tracks onto the southbound tracks, where you see it in the photo set. The train almost stopped in time, which is why there's more or less a solid car on the bed of that tow truck. When I first arrived at the crossing, the train was wreathed in a pall of smoke from its brakes -- you could smell them from a hundred or more feet away.

The emergency response was impressive, with seven firefighters and six or so police officers (and a sheriff's deputy) on scene within a couple minutes. Once they determined that no one was hurt and secured the one random tube that the collision knocked loose, both trains were able to move out. All told, the delay was about thirty minutes, which isn't too bad. And no one died, so it's a win all around.

Flickr photoset taken with my trusty cellphone