Several people were injured Wednesday at an amusement park in Branson, Missouri, after sections of a train ride derailed, the park said.
Six guests and one employee were transported by ambulance to get medical treatment, the Silver Dollar City theme park said in a statement on Twitter. Only one guest remained in the hospital Thursday, the park said, without detailing the extent of the injuries.
“Onsite paramedics provided emergency care until first responders arrived,” the park said.
The Frisco Silver Dollar Line Steam Train brings guests on a scenic 20-minute ride through the countryside, interrupted by a theatrical “stick-up” by a band of train robbers, the park’s website says. The ride is billed as a staple of the park that has been in operation since 1962.
Gary Eldridge and his family came to Silver Dollar City for the pumpkin festival and were riding in the last car of the train when it derailed, he told CNN.
“We had just passed the part of the ride where they gave the moonshine skit,” Eldridge said. “We went around the next corner and the car in front of me acted like it hit a bump and started shaking real bad. It derailed and took the cars in front of it with it.”
A video he took of the toppled train shows several bright red train cars flipped on their side, some with their wheels detached and sitting on the track.
Eldridge’s family was in a car that didn’t flip and were unharmed, he said.
The Missouri Division of Fire Safety said Thursday it has finished the first stage of its investigation of the derailment and plans to return later with an engineering firm.
“No determination has been made about the cause of the derailment at this time,” the agency tweeted.
Silver Dollar City has not commented on a possible cause of the accident.
On a spring evening in 2015, Geralyn Ritter sprinted through Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station to catch her New York-bound train. The next thing she knew, she was hooked up to a ventilator at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, fighting for her life.
“I remember a flash of realization that we were tipping over, and I remember screaming,” Ritter, 57, of Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, told The Post. “That was the last memory I had.”
The infamous Amtrak train crash on May 12, 2015, killed eight and injured more than 200 passengers. Ritter was among 11 passengers who were critically wounded, and the pharmaceutical executive relays her traumatic experience and excruciating recovery in a new memoir, “Bone by Bone: A Memoir of Trauma and Healing,” (Core Media Group) out Tuesday.
“The thing that hits me over, and over, again is how ordinary the day was. That morning seven years ago, my life was normal,” Ritter told The Post. “I was healthy, and I will never be that healthy again.”
The evening of the fateful crash, Ritter was seated in business class which occupied the first car on the train. Her husband texted that one of her three sons, Steven, 8 at the time, had done well at baseball practice earlier that evening. Then she stood up to get something from her briefcase and realized something was off.
“I noticed that we seemed to be going faster. Usually the train pulls out [of Philadelphia] really slowly, and I’m always impatient,” she said.
Her instincts were correct. The Northeast Regional service entered the Frankford Junction curve in North Philadelphia going 106 miles per hour — more than twice the 50 mph limit for the notorious, 90-degree turn. The engineer applied the emergency brakes, and seconds later, according to the National Transportation Safety Board accident report, the train jumped the tracks.
“I remember feeling like the train was tipping, and thinking that was impossible because trains don’t tip. I realized we were —” Ritter said, trailing off.
Life derailed
Ritter’s body was hurled from the train with such force that her abdominal organs push through her diaphragm, up into her chest. Or what was left of it. On impact, most of her ribs were crushed, her lungs collapsed. She broke her pelvis and multiple vertebrae in her neck and back. She ruptured her diaphragm and bladder, lacerated her spleen and intestines. She suffered major blood loss and was left unable to breathe.
“My stomach was up above my heart. My colon was under my armpit,” Ritter said.
Complicating matters, she didn’t have her wallet on her and was separated from her briefcase, so nobody knew who she was.
“I was a Jane Doe,” she said.
Doctors weren’t optimistic about her prognosis.
“They weren’t sure at the time whether I was going to be paralyzed,” she said. “My surgeon told me later, ‘I have no explanation for how your body absorbed that much force, and you don’t have a brain injury.’ It’s one of the reasons I can tell my story, because I remember it.”
Meanwhile, Ritter’s husband, Jonathan, finally located her after was searching hospital after hospital. He didn’t initially recognize his wife, who had her eyes tapes shut and was on a ventilator. But when he saw a watch he’d given her, which had miraculously survived the crash, he knew it was her.
We found her, he texted their oldest son Austin. She’s alive.
Still, doctors feared she might not survive.
“They told my family it was unlikely that I was going to make it,” Ritter said. Her brother flew in from Fort Worth, Texas. He packed a dark suit.
After a month — and multiple surgeries to repair her intestines, screw her pelvis back together and plate her broken ribs — Ritter was released from the hospital and went home in a wheelchair. By September, she was able to walk short distances, but her long recovery was just beginning.
Road to recovery
In pain and struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, Ritter became increasingly depressed and dependent on narcotics.
“I was on massive doses of fentanyl andOxycontin,” she recalled. “I’d be lying on my back in bed, and I couldn’t even reach the pill bottle beside me.”
The lack of mobility and independence would be difficult for any recovering patient; for Ritter, who lived a fast-paced life where she’d hop off a flight home from China and rush home to the local baseball field to cheer on her boys, the life change was hell — both on her, and on her marriage.
“My husband had to transition from focusing on his career to being a full-time caregiver for me and our sons,” Ritter said. “We both reacted differently to the stress. He had a lot of anger about the accident and I was just sad. There were many times when we simply couldn’t give each other what the other one needed.”
Over time, she became dependent on the opioids.
“In the beginning, it was all about gratitude. We were just so grateful that I lived and I didn’t have a brain injury,” she said. “But you can only be grateful for massive pain for so long,”
Six months after the accident, she decided to try and wean off of the drugs, under medical supervision. She turned to holistic methods of pain control — meditation, breathing, exercise, and gentle yoga.
She was successful, and now relies on over-the-counter meds to manage her pain.
“Only Advil and Tylenol,” she said proudly. “But I take a lot of Advil and Tylenol.”
She and Jonathan eventually got professional counseling that helped them adjust to their new reality. They will soon celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.
In 2017, Ritter was finally able to return to the office. She now works as the head of external affairs for a healthcare company, Organon in Jersey City. She is back to riding trains again, including Amtrak, which she admits was nerve wracking at first.
“The journey back [was] a long one,” Ritter said.
In the seven years since the crash, she’s had over 30 surgeries, including a major emergency abdominal operation related to to scar tissue. In August, she’s due for a hernia procedure.
“Everybody faces major setbacks. At some point, we all go through something,” Ritter said. “That metaphor of light at the end of the tunnel – you don’t come out of the tunnel the same way you went in. It’s not a matter of getting back to normal, you’re changed by it, and that’s okay.”
TEHRAN, Iran — A passenger train partially derailed in eastern Iran early Wednesday, killing at least 17 people and injuring 50 more, including some critically, authorities said.
The report said the number of casualties could rise, though initial details about the disaster involving a train reportedly carrying some 350 passengers remained unclear.
Four of the seven cars in the train derailed in the early morning darkness near the desert city of Tabas, Iranian state television reported. Tabas is some 340 miles southeast of the capital, Tehran.
Rescue teams with ambulances and helicopters had arrived in the remote area where communication is poor. Over a dozen people suffered critical injuries, with some transferred to local hospitals, officials said.
Iranian media quoted the governor of Tabas, Ali Akbar Rahimi, as saying the crash killed at least 17 people and that the number of fatalities may rise as rescuers search the train cars.
Aerial footage of the desert site of the disaster showed train cars on their side, with some rescuers running at the scene as they tried to care for those injured.
State TV later aired images from a hospital where the injured received treatment. One of those injured told the broadcaster they felt the train suddenly brake and then slow before the derailment.
“Passengers were bouncing in the car like balls in the air,” said the injured passenger, whom state TV did not identify.
The derailment happened some 30 miles outside of Tabas on the rail that links the city to the central city of Yazd.
The report said the crash is under investigation. Initial reports suggested the train collided with an excavator near the track, though it wasn’t immediately clear why an excavator would have been close to the train track at night. One official suggests it could have been part of a repair project.
Iran’s worst train disaster came in 2004, when a runaway train loaded with gasoline, fertilizer, sulfur and cotton crashed near the historic city of Neyshabur, killing some 320 people, injuring 460 others and damaging five villages. Another train crash in 2016 killed dozens and injuries of scores of people.
Iran has some 8,700 miles of railway lines throughout a country about two and a half times the size of Texas. Its rail system sends both people and goods across the country, particularly in rural areas.
Iran also has some 17,000 annual deaths on its highways, one of the world’s worst traffic safety records. The high toll is blamed on wide disregard for traffic laws, unsafe vehicles and inadequate emergency services.
Iran, already straining under U.S. sanctions over its collapsed nuclear deal, has been mourning the deaths of at least 41 people killed in a building collapse in the country’s southwest.
An elderly couple was killed in a crash involving a train in rural Kansas on Thursday night while driving home from their family’s Thanksgiving dinner, according to local officials.
Around 6:30 p.m. local time on Thursday, officials believe a slow-moving freight train struck the couple in their vehicle in Miami County.
The vehicle was pushed a considerable distance down the tracks while the train tried to stop. At some point, the vehicle caught fire, officials told KCTV.
The elderly victims, who are from the Kansas City metro area, had been on their way home from Thanksgiving dinner when the accident happened. Their adult son reportedly showed up at the scene after the accident.
“This is an emotional call for anybody involved in this,” said Capt. Matthew Kelly with the Miami County Sheriff’s Office said, according to KCTV. “Not just for the family but also for us on scene. Nobody wants to go to these calls. These are very traumatic for anybody involved. Anybody that has anything to do with this. I think it makes it even more traumatic on a holiday like this.”
He said his department has reached out to the victim’s family to offer any assistance.
The investigation — which will include checking whether the crossing’s railways and lights were functioning properly — is ongoing, officials said.