Oct 18 2006
Collision Transit Authority
Northbound Purple Express train car 2561 collided with an inbound Brown Line train at 5:31PM today while rounding one of the many turns between Merchandise Mart and Chicago.
I was dosing off, listening to music on my video iPod, when I heard the start of metal scraping up against metal. I looked up and out of the corner of my eye I saw a shower of sparks covering the window area of the EL car window.
The last car of the Purple Line that I was in had sideswiped the Brown Line car and was emitting an array of sparks. The collision jostled and a few Trixies and they were thrown off balance.
What did our CTA operator do? Slow down a little bit but after a few seconds we sped towards the Chicago stop.
Loading ...
Silly Chad! Were you “dosing” during work, or did you drop after?
That’s probably why you saw all of the sparks.
Is there no pleasing you? I can imagine the scathing blog entry you’d have written if the conductor had stopped, walked up and down every car to make sure everyone was OK, holding up all the other brown and purple trains for 20 minutes. I’m sure you’d be all self-important, talking about how you had somewhere to be and you had to sit on the train for half an hour over something as stupid as a couple of sparks!
This is actually something that’s rather major–it either means the two sets of tracks are no longer as far apart as they should be or that the grade if off. The operators probably didn’t stop because they couldn’t see or tell that the trains hit each other. You should let someone know that this happened (the most appropriate email from the website seems to be the customer service one–ctahelp@transitchicago.com) so that the CTA can check the cars for damage and make sure that there aren’t more serious problems with the tracks along the curve.