Marcus and I went to Philadelphia on Saturday 22 December. I wanted to meet Smallbones to talk about a collaboration between the Khan Academy’s Smarthistory program and Wikipedia and to meet with UseTheCommandLine and Ocaasi to talk about instances of the campus ambassador program at medical schools in Portland and San Francisco. Wiki Med just got founded and those two are each organizing classes in those places, and it just so happens that both lived in Philly and that I could visit also. We met at this coffeehouse and it was probably one of the most important meetings in the history of medicine because I think it represented the first in-person conversation about group collaboration among Wikipedians who are designing best practices for applying the campus ambassador model of the Wikipedia Education Program as a medical school outreach strategy. This project has potential to propagate itself in a highly attractive demographic and I wish the best for it.
But before this happened, Marcus and I were taking the A train south to Penn Station. Suddenly, at 81st street, the train crashed!
We hear a loud noise and felt the train shake. The train stopped and we just stood around for 90 minutes. Later we heard that the track broke because of material fatigue and a wheel flew off the train. There was a pregnant woman on our car, and had she gone into labor Marcus would have had to deliver her baby. While we were waiting, the announcer said that a rescue train was coming. Somehow everyone in our car had the idea that the train would arrive parallel to us and that its doors would match all the doors in our train. There was speculation that this train would have some large number of bridges, because people would not be expected to jump the large space between trains on two parallel tracks, and they would therefore need bridges. When the rescue train arrived everyone was disappointed because it actually just backed up to the front of the train and we traveled between the cars in the very ordinary way in which people travel between train cars without special bridges. When we looked out at the 81st Street Station we saw perhaps 20 police and firemen. The firemen had axes, which I presume they would have used to cut the subway cars open like cans had we needed to get out through something other than the doors. I am often not conscious of conversations around me, but Marcus said that he was worried about a gentleman on the train who became increasingly vocal throughout the wait for rescue that if someone did not take action to relieve him of the problem of his delay that he felt a need to respond to the situation by acting to “knife some bitches up”.
After everyone was on the rescue train it took us to the next stop on the A line, Columbus Circle, and they kicked us off the train. We got out there and booked new tickets because by this time we missed our bus to Philly. We arrived in Philly only a bit late and the crisis for us ended there, except for the trauma of the experience.
Evidently this was a really big deal because it got a lot of media attention.
- A Train Derailed On The Upper West Side In “Extremely Rare” Event
- A/C/D Subway Service Back To Normal After Saturday Morning UWS A-Train Derailment
- Subway service back to normal after derailment
- Express Train Derails on Upper West Side
- Flashback: Revisiting The Worst Train Derailments In NYC History