At least one passenger was killed and 41 people were injured when two trains collided at a Mexico City train station on Tuesday.
Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said on Twitter that one of the trains reversed into the other by accident at the Tacubaya 1 line station shortly before midnight.
The crash disrupted service Wednesday on the bustling metro system serving the megalopolis of over 20 million people.
Paramedics treated 25 of the injured, including both train engineers at the scene, Sheinbaum said. All the injuries were ‘light to medium’ and not life-threatening.
The lone casualty, identified as José Adán was sitting in the last car of the idle train when it was crushed by the incoming train. The 42-year-old suffered several face and torso fractures.
First responders carry out an injured passenger after a train reversed into an idle train at a subway station in Mexico City, leaving a 42-year-old man dead and 41 people injured. The accident took place 20 minutes before the end of service Tuesday night when one train was headed to the garage to prepare for Wednesday morning service
A man is pulled out of one of the mangled train cars moments after Tuesday night’s train crash at Mexico City’s Tacubaya 1 line station. The accident caused significant delays Wednesday
Mexico City Metro director Florencia Serranía said the magnitude of the crash could have been far less if the cars were equipped with ‘mechanism prevents one train from riding on the other’
Sheimbaum’s chief of staff, Rosa Icela Rodríguez, said that only four of the 16 remained in hospitals. She said the cause of the crash was under investigation.
Mexico City Metro director Florencia Serranía said at a news conference that the ‘black boxes’ from both trains, which will provide a ‘second-by-second’ record of what happened, were turned over to the city prosecutor’s office and their information appeared to be intact.
Workers had separated the stacked metro cars and were working to clear the track. She said she expected the line to be ready for service Thursday morning.
Serranía said the accident occurred 20 minutes before the end of service Tuesday night when one train was headed to the garage to prepare for Wednesday morning service.
Firefighters and paramedics evacuate an injured passenger out of the Tacubaya 1 line station
About five cars on each train were damaged during Tuesday night train crash in Mexico City
She added that an international expert had been hired to conduct an independent review of the incident.
Metro Workers Union leader Fernando Espino told Imagen TV that the train was traveling at a speed of 43 miles per hours before it crashed into the parked train.
Serranía told Milenio television that the magnitude of the accident could have been lessened if the train cars would have been updated with a collision system.
‘These trains that are from 1983 and do not have a system that when a train collides, a mechanism prevents one train from riding on the other and they did not,’ Serranía said. ‘If they had had the collision of the rear cabin with the front, which have shock absorbers, it would have been an accident with less impact.’
About five cars on each train were damaged.
Images of the accident published in local media showed wrecked subway cars derailed in the underground station, and rescuers carrying people away.
Subway riders wait for buses as an alternative form of transport outside the Chapultepec metro station, the morning after two trains collided at the Tacubaya station in Mexico City
Emergency service personnel attempt to pry a train door open after a train backed up into a station and collided with another train inside a Mexico City station Tuesday. a 42-year-old man identified as José Adán was killed and 42 people were injured
The Mexico City Metro system, one of the world’s largest and most transited, has seen at least two serious accidents since it opened five decades ago.
In 2015 a train failed to brake in time and smashed into another at the Oceania station in the city’s north, injuring 12 people. Authorities later blamed ‘double human error.’
In the most serious incident, two trains collided at the Viaducto station in 1975, killing at least 31 and injuring more than 70, according to the national newspaper El Universal.
Tacubaya is a key station for the Metro system, with three of its 12 lines intersecting there, and there were disruptions during the Wednesday morning commute.
Metro authorities said service on Line 1 would be reduced throughout the day with Tacubaya and a neighboring station out of action and 45 buses deployed to bridge the gap of about 2.5 miles.
Mexico City’s Metro system transported more than 1.6 billion passengers in 2018, according to official figures, or about 4.4 million per day.