Looking back at the Amtrak crash that killed 8 people at Frankford Junction, 10 years later

The locomotive barreled toward New York, dragging seven Amtrak passenger cars through Port Richmond on a warm and dark spring evening, quickening its pace as the speed limit decreased.

Radio chatter — kids had thrown rocks at a SEPTA train and injured an engineer — caught the Amtrak engineer’s ear.

The train he was piloting, Amtrak Train 188, accelerated to 106 mph in a 50-mph zone, powering toward a dangerous curve at Frankford Junction.

At 9:21 p.m. on May 12, 2015, the train hit the curve, and the engineer slammed the emergency brakes.

A violent vibration reverberated down the string of train cars as passengers watched Netflix on their laptops, chatted with spouses on the phone, poked at their iPad games.

And then those devices — as well as purses and glasses and shoes — went airborne.

“It just tilted like you were going around a sharp curve,” said passenger Mary Barcellos of New York, describing her experience to The Inquirer on the night of the crash, “and then it just flipped all the way over.”

The train cars spilled off the track and skidded to the ground. People were thrown against windows and hurled into overhead luggage racks. Train cars are built to protect passengers from being propelled forward, but not against lateral motion.

As the scene settled, screams rose from the mass of mangled metal. Passengers could smell burned rubber, and as they moved, they could feel the crunch of glass.

Police officers who arrived at the scene didn’t wait for ambulances, scooping up injured riders and driving them to hospitals in their squad cars and wagons, while SEPTA buses ferried groups to nearby trauma centers. Amid the chaos patients were unevenly spread across the city’s medical facilities.

It all amounted to the deadliest Northeast Corridor rail crash in a generation. Of the 253 people on board, eight passengers were killed, and more than 150 were injured. Amtrak estimated its damages to be more than $30.84 million. And in one of the largest rail crash settlements in U.S. history, the agency agreed to pay out $265 million to derailment victims.

The National Transportation Safety Board conducted a yearlong investigation. The report concluded that the engineer lost his bearings as he accelerated into the curve, likely because he was distracted by the radio chatter. He likely thought he was on a stretch of track beyond the curve, which had a speed limit of 110 mph.

The report called it a loss of “situational awareness.” Attempts to bring criminal charges against the engineer were ultimately unsuccessful, and a jury found him not guilty of causing a catastrophe, eight counts of involuntary manslaughter, and almost 250 counts of reckless endangerment.

“The engineer’s world is one of fallible human decisions and actions in an imperfect environment,” NTSB chairman Christopher Hart said in 2016.

And the structure of the train cars didn’t help. As the chain of silver cars fell to its sides, the windows didn’t hold. Four of the deaths were passengers who died after being ejected.

Engineers quickly determined that positive train control — an automatic braking system that slows or stops a train to prevent an accident if an engineer fails to do so — would have prevented the derailment if it had been installed on Train 188.

In the years since, positive train control has been installed on all Amtrak-owned or -controlled trains, and cars have been outfitted with more hardened windows.

Eli Kulp, the celebrated Fork chef who was paralyzed in the crash, has described struggles with his mental health, alcohol, and loss of identity in the wake of the derailment.

“All I want to do is stand at the pass, plate food, and see the look on the diners’ faces. … That was my identity for 27 years,” he told restaurant critic Craig LaBan in 2020. “But you have to find areas you’re still very capable in, where you’re still able to make a difference.”