'Black box' will show derailed New York train's speed

The recovered "black box" will show if a New York commuter train that derailed on a sharp curve, killing four passengers, was going too fast, officials said. "We don't know what the train's speed was. We'll learn that from the vehicle event recorders," National Transportation Safety Board member Earl Weener told reporters after a Metro-North Commuter Railroad train jumped the tracks at 7:20 a.m. Sunday on one of the busy commuter rail line's sharpest curves, where the Hudson River meets the Harlem River in the Bronx, just north of Manhattan. The train originated in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., about 80 miles north of its destination at Grand Central Terminal. Train event recorders are similar to flight data recorders found on aircraft. All seven passenger cars derailed, as did the diesel locomotive pushing them from the rear. The train's front car stopped just at the edge of the water. Two other cars flipped onto their sides. Emilie Miyauchi, 28, told The Wall Street Journal she was in the front car traveling from suburban Ossining, N.Y., to New York City for a yoga class. "The train was going like pretty fast, and as it was turning the corner it just felt like it was going like out of control," she told the Journal. "It started to like speed up and feel a little out of control, like one or two seconds before it derailed." The train car fell on its side and she smacked her head against the window, she said. "I felt the window just disappear, and all this dirt came in, all this soil and branches," she said, adding she grabbed onto her seat to keep from being ejected. In addition to the dead, who included three people ejected from the train, the accident injured 63 people, 11 of them critically, officials said. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said late Sunday he thought "most, if not all, of those that were critical look like they will be OK, eventually." New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told reporters train engineer William Rockefeller, who was hospitalized for injuries in the accident, described applying the brakes as the train approached the curve, where the speed limit drops to 30 mph from 70 mph, but Cuomo said it was unclear what happened afterward. "That curve has been here for many, many years. Trains take the curve every day, 365 days a year," Cuomo told reporters at the scene late Sunday. "So it's not the fact that there's a curve here. "We've always had this configuration -- we didn't have accidents, right?" he said, "So there has to be another factor." An official from the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the commuter rail service, told The New York Times Rockefeller said the train was going into the turn too fast and he slammed on the emergency brakes of all the train's cars at once, a last-resort procedure known as "dumping the brakes." Union officials told the Journal Rockefeller was a roughly 20-year veteran at Metro-North and had an excellent reputation. Weener said he didn't know if faulty brakes or the diesel locomotive's position at the rear of the train were factors in the crash. "We'll be looking at it," he said. The Federal Railroad Administration, which enforces rail safety regulations, is also investigating the accident. The fatalities were the first passenger deaths in the railroad's 30-year history and its second serious accident this year. In May, two Metro-North trains slammed into each other in Bridgeport, Conn., during the evening rush hour, injuring 76 people, five critically. Metro-North is the nation's second-busiest commuter railroad, running service between New York City and its northern suburbs in New York state and Connecticut.