'The train started shaking violently.' Philly man among 110 injured in South Carolina Amtrak crash
"We're coming home, back to Kensington, where it's safe," said Derek Pettaway, who suffered minor injuries while traveling with his wife.
Arrive in Florida, check into a hotel near Orlando, have dinner, and watch the Eagles in the Super Bowl.
That was the Sunday that Derek Pettaway, 33, of Kensington, had planned for himself.
Instead, he wound up wandering dazed in the dark outside a derailed Amtrak train in South Carolina, then in a hospital emergency department and, once cleared by doctors, in an emergency shelter making plans to return to Philadelphia with his wife as quickly as a rental car could be arranged.
"We're coming home, back to Kensington, where it's safe," Pettaway said during a phone interview late Sunday morning.
The office manager for Unite Here, Local 274, and his wife, Erin Witman, 32, were among the luckier passengers on the Amtrak Silver Star that struck a CSX freight train parked on a side track in South Carolina about 2:35 a.m. Sunday en route from New York to Miami. Two Amtrak employees, the conductor and the engineer, were killed and more than 110 of the 140 passengers aboard were injured in the accident about 10 miles south of Columbia. Gov. Henry McMaster said the Amtrak train was traveling about 59 mph at the time of the crash.
National Transportation Safety Board investigators had not determined how both trains wound up on the same track. The governor said the Amtrak train was on the wrong track.
Pettaway, who hit his head on the wall of his sleeper cabin when the Amtrak train abruptly stopped, was diagnosed with minor whiplash, he said, leaving him with a "weird pain in the neck" and a headache. Witman, director of operations for the PhillyLiving real estate team at Keller Williams, was uninjured – "not a scratch on her, not a bump," Pettaway said.
The couple boarded the train at 30th Street Station on Saturday, departing around 12:30 p.m. for a week's vacation at Disney destinations in Orlando. Pettaway said he went to bed about 11:30 p.m. in one of a few sleeper cars near the back of the train.
He awoke when "the train started shaking violently. The train came to an abrupt halt. I kind of go sliding head-first into the wall of the sleeper cabin," Pettaway said. "It felt like a low-grade traffic accident."
What followed, he said, was "this weird state of shock. … Fortunately the Amtrak staff was very professional, very quick to get everyone off the train."
Outside in the cold and dark Pettaway noticed the engine on its side and the café car "folded in half." He and Witman were in the car just behind that one, which was off the tracks and partly in a ditch, he said. First responders were working on the injured, he said.
"I'm lucky," Pettaway said, though he also noted several other recent rail accidents and said, "You would think given the law of statistics you would be OK" with a flawless train trip this weekend. "But, no."
On Wednesday, a chartered Amtrak train carrying Republican members of Congress and their families to a retreat struck a garbage truck at a crossing in rural Virginia, killing one person in the truck and injuring six people. And, on Dec. 18, three people died and dozens were injured when an Amtrak train traveling nearly 80 mph derailed along a curve during an inaugural run near Tacoma, Wash.
He and Witman had opted to take a train to Florida because his wife doesn't like flying.
A rental car provided by Amtrak will be their mode of travel back to Philadelphia.
"Erin doesn't fly and I'm pretty sure she's not ready to hop back on the train," Pettaway said.
Originally from northern Virginia, Pettaway said he is now "an adopted Eagles fan." Watching the team play in the Super Bowl still remained his goal for Sunday night, but if it didn't happen, "it's not the end of the world," he said. "I've got my priorities."