Jeremy Wladis was on the last car of the train. He had been in Washington for work on Tuesday, and he was returning home to New York.
Then he felt the jolt. The train was leaving the tracks.
Wladis, 51, saw “phones, laptops, everything flying,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“There were women launched up in the luggage rack,” he said. “I don’t even know how they got there.”
Once the train came to a rest, he and others helped the women down and they made their escape.
Another passenger, Daniel Wetrin, 37 of New York, told the paper that the initial shock was gentle “compared to what came next.”
“Within two seconds, it was chaos,” he said.
Nurse ignores own injuries to help others
Joan Elfman thought her ribs were probably broken. But, as a nurse, her mind was on the others who were hurt.
“I saw so many head injuries and bloody faces,” she told told CNN affiliate KYW. “There were a lot of fractures — arms, shoulders, all kinds of fractures.”
When Amtrak Northeast Regional Train 188 derailed in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, it tore apart passenger cars, toppling some over. The engine was a mangled wreck, the rails torn up.
At least six people were killed and 136 more were hospitalized — some with critical injuries.
Elfman couldn’t believe the destruction.
“This is a nightmare,” she recalled thinking, “and it can’t be happening.”
‘Then there was a jolt’
Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor is 363 miles of track connecting Washington to Boston. It is the busiest railroad in North America.
Each day three times more people ride a train between Washington and New York City than fly the route.
Train 188 was on its way from Washington to New York, carrying 238 commuters and five crew members at the end of another workday.
The trip was uneventful until the train passed through the Port Richmond neighborhood in Philadelphia.
That’s when Wetrin saw passengers catapulted from their seats.
“There were two people above our head in the luggage rack asking to be helped down,” he told CNN. “It was just unbelievable.”
Passenger thought train rounded curve ‘a little too fast’
It has not yet been established whether speed was a factor in the crash. But passenger Janna D’Ambrisi said she thought the train was going “a little too fast around a curve.”
“Then there was a jolt. And immediately you could tell the train derailed,” she said. “I was thrown into the girl next to me, sitting in the window seat. The train started to tip that way, to the right. And people on the other side of the train started to fall on us.”
Moments later, she heard a banging from the bathroom. A man inside was screaming.
“He was trying to unlock the door, but it was stuck,” D’Ambrisi said. The metal must have been bent.”
‘Keep crawling, OK?’
Seven train cars were thrown from the tracks. Some landed upside down. Others looked like smashed aluminum cans.
A video posted on Instagram showed people trying to help passengers out.
“Keep crawling, OK?” one man tells a passenger.
“Where am I crawling to?” the passenger asks.
“Crawl forward, sir,” another man says.
‘Thank you, thank you, thank you’
Many passengers walked away, some with bloodied shirts or head wounds wrapped in bandages.
But the journey from the crash site was also treacherous.
“All the power cables that run parallel to the track caved in,” Wetrin said. “There were cut cables hanging around.”
Many passengers, including former U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, praised the firefighters and police, who arrived within minutes.
“Thank you so much to all the first responders-there w/in minutes,” Murphy tweeted. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
‘Luckily, I’m still here’
Not all the rescuers wore uniforms.
“My son went back and got everybody off our one car,” Joan Elfman said. “There was a very small opening in the door, and we were able to get out.”
Her son, Max, told KYW that his first priority was getting his mother off the train. Then he went to help help the strangers.
“Luckily I’m still here, I’m still walking,” Max Elfman said. “So I figured I would do my best to help because I saw everyone — I could see the blood on people’s faces. They can’t move. … So I just tried to do my best to help people get out of that car.”