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During the morning of September 19, 2008, a Metro Blue Line train collided with a Metro bus in downtown Los Angeles, causing minor injuries to 13 people, authorities said.

The accident, which occurred near Washington Boulevard and Griffith Avenue, was reported around 6:15 a.m., said Officer Ana Aguirre of the Los Angeles Police Department. The injuries are believed to be “just bumps and bruises,” but Aguirre said paramedics are on the scene. No one has been taken to the hospital yet, she said.

The bus was not carrying any passengers. All the injuries were to people on the Blue Line train, said Brian Humphrey, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department. The collision caused the train to derail but it remained upright, he said.

The Blue Line train was southbound when the collision occurred, and a bus is being arranged to carry rail passengers between the San Pedro and Long Beach Boulevard stations while the track was being cleared, said Metro spokesman Jose Upaldo.

The Blue Line travels from downtown Los Angeles to downtown Long Beach, serving many South L.A. areas, such as Compton, Vernon and Florence-Firestone. It is the longest line in the Metro system and the second busiest light rail line in the United States, averaging more than 70,000 weekday boardings, according to Metro Rail.

On September 15, 2008, officials investigating a commuter rail collision last Friday that killed 25 people said they want to review cell phone records to determine if an engineer blamed for running a stop signal before the crash may have been text messaging at the time.

A smaller number of commuters than normal returned to the rails on the morning of September 15, 2008 and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was one of the first to board a morning train.

“I want to dispel any fears about taking the train,” the mayor said. “Safety has to be our number one concern, and while accidents can and do happen, taking the train is still one of the safest and fastest options for commuters.”

The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed on Sunday that the engineer, who was killed in the crash, had failed to stop at the final red signal.

NTSB experts are planning to review the cell phone records of two 14-year-old boys and the engineer after the teens told CBS2-TV that they received a text message from the engineer shortly before the crash.
The Los Angeles station said the teen was among a group of youths who befriended the engineer and asked him questions about his work.

NTSB board member Kitty Higgins said investigators did not find a cell phone belonging to the engineer in the wreckage but would request his cell phone records, as well as those of the boys.

“We are going to be obtaining records from their cell phones and from the cell phones of the deceased engineer and will use our subpoena authority or whatever other legal authority we need and to begin to determine exactly what happened and what if any role that might have played in this accident,” she said on September 14, 2008.

The commuter train carrying 220 people rolled past stop signals on September 12, 2008 and barreled head-on into a Union Pacific train in Chatsworth. The accident, the nation’s deadliest rail disaster in 15 years left train cars so mangled that some bodies had to be removed in pieces. The crash injured 138 people.

Also on September 15, 2008, the Metrolink spokeswoman who announced on September 13, 2008, that the engineer’s mistake caused the crash resigned. She said the railroad’s board called her announcement “premature,” even though NTSB officials later backed it up.

Metrolink did not return phone messages on the resignation.

NTSB investigators said on September 14, 2008 that the train failed to stop at the final red signal, which forced the train onto a track at 42 mph where the Union Pacific freight was traveling in the opposite direction, Higgins said at a news conference.

Higgins said she believed the crash could have been prevented with technology that stops a train on the track when a signal is disobeyed. The technology was not in place where the collision occurred.

“I believe this technology could have prevented the accident. If he ran the signal the train would have been stopped. I’ve seen it tested. It makes a difference,” she said.

“What’s it going to take? How many more accidents are we going to have to see like this that could have been prevented if this technology were in place?” Higgins said.

Higgins said audio recordings from the commuter train indicate a period of silence as it passed the last two signals before the fiery wreck, a time when the engineer and the conductor should have been performing verbal safety checks.

She cautioned, however, that the train may have entered a dead zone where the recording was interrupted.

Higgins said the NTSB would measure the distance between the signals along the track on Monday.

Investigators also want to interview the conductor, who was injured, about the recording, she said.

“He’ll be able to tell us whether he recalls the engineer calling out and him confirming those signals,” Higgins said.

Data show that the Metrolink train ran the red light signal with devastating consequences.

“The Metrolink train went through the signal, did not observe the red signal and essentially forced open this section of the switch,” Higgins said. “The switch bars were bent like a banana. It should be perfectly straight.”

Higgins said experts still must examine whether the signal was working properly and were in the Metrolink engineer’s line of sight.

However, she stressed that obeying signals on the track was an engineer’s responsibility at the helm of a train.

“My understanding is it is very unusual for an experienced engineer to run a red light,” she said.

Metrolink said earlier Sunday that a dispatcher tried to warn the engineer of the commuter train that he was about to collide with a freight train but the call came too late. The dispatcher reached the conductor in the rear of the train, but by then it had already crashed into the oncoming Union Pacific train, Metrolink officials said.

However, the NTSB contradicted Metrolink’s report. Higgins said that the dispatcher noticed something was wrong, but before he could contact the train, the conductor who survived called in to report the wreck.

The collision occurred on a horseshoe-shaped section of track in Chatsworth at the west end of the San Fernando Valley, near a 500-foot-long tunnel underneath Stoney Point Park.

The commuter train was heading from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles to Ventura County. The impact rammed the Metrolink engine backward, jamming it deep into the first passenger car.

It was the deadliest passenger train crash since Sept. 22, 1993, when Amtrak’s Sunset Limited plunged off a trestle into a bayou near Mobile, Alabama, moments after the trestle was damaged by a towboat; 47 people were killed.

On September 12, 2008, the mayor of Los Angeles announced that a passenger train collided head-on with a freight train just outside Los Angeles, California. “The latest figures that we have is, there’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 fatalities,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told reporters. “That’s probably the most serious train wreck to occur here in a very long time.”

Those confirmed dead include a Los Angeles police officer who happened to be riding Ventura County Line passenger train 111 when it smashed head-on into a Union Pacific freight train shortly before 4:30 p.m. Pacific Time.

The death toll is expected to rise by the time emergency workers finish sifting through the mangled debris near the town of Chatsworth northwest of Los Angeles.

“It’s terrible,” Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman Karen Smith said of the crash. “They are still working away.”

More than 70 people were injured in the crash, according to the Metrolink, which operates the commuter rail service.

While there was no immediate evidence of intentional wrongdoing, the crash site is being treated as a crime scene “just to be on the safe side until we figure this out,” Smith said.

The collision near the town of Chatsworth northwest of Los Angeles caused a fire and at least one car of the commuter train and seven cars from the freight train to derail.

The accident occured at about 2323 GMT on a curvy section of track some 31 miles of Los Angeles.

The derailed passenger train car lay ripped open and on its side, with firefighters attempting to put out the flames and rescue crews working at the scene, according to live images aired on local broadcaster ABC7.

“Clearly something went wrong,” Metrolink’s Denise Tyrrell told ABC7. “There was a failure somewhere along the line.”

“There are many failsafes, but we’re still dealing with human beings and mechanical devices, so after we have ascertained that our passengers are off that train and everyone is in good condition, then we’ll start investigating the actual crash itself.”

Tyrell told ABC7 that a locomotive was pulling the Metrolink train, and the force of the crash may have pushed the locomotive into the first passenger car.

It was not immediately clear how many people were aboard the Metrolink train, although typically as many as 400 people ride the line involved in the crash.

The number 111 commuter departed Los Angeles headed for Moorpark, a bedroom community 47 miles northwest of California’s largest city.

LA Fire Department captain Armando Hogan said some 100 fire personnel responded to the accident. Many of the injuries were “mostly from people being kind of jolted around,” he said.

On January 26, 2005, a Metrolink train hit a Jeep that had been parked on the train tracks in Atwater Village. The train bound for Los Angeles derailed and struck two other trains, killing 11 people.