Amtrak train derailment latest: Fourth person dies after train hit dump truck in Missouri

At least one couple onboard the Amtrak train which collided with a dump truck near Mendon, Missouri, were celebrating a wedding anniversary when the derailment occurred.

Dian Couture was in the dining car with her husband celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary when she heard a loud noise and the train wobbled and then crashed onto its side, the Associated Press reported.

“The people on our left-hand side flew across and hit us, and then we were standing on the windows on the right-hand side of the car,” she told WDAF-TV. “Two gentlemen in the front came up, stacked a bunch of things and popped out the window and literally pulled us out by our hands.” 

Amtrak confirmed that 275 passengers were riding the Los Angeles to Chicago service when it derailed. Three paassengers were among the four people killed.

A farmer who warned authorities and other Missouri residents of the apparent dangers of the railroad crossing where an Amtrak train derailed on Monday has said it was “a matter of time” before such an incident occurred.

Mike Spencer, 64, said in an interview with the Kansas City Star that promises to upgrade the crossing – which does not have signals or lights – had fallen flat. Nor had the brush been cut back to improve visibility.

A second farmer, 62-year-old Daryl Jacobs, agreed and said: “It needs arms on it or signals”.

The driver of the drump truck which collided with an Amtrak train carrying 275 passengers on Monday was working on a local infrastructure project, according to local resident and farmer Mike Spencer.

He said the driver had been delivering rock to a nearby project on a creek where a levy is being built, which had been going for a couple of days, according to the Associated Press.

Another farmer, 62-year-old Daryl Jacobs, told the Kansas City Star the driver appeared to “stall” on a ramp leading up to the railroad crossing before the vehicle ended-up on the tracks. That remains to be confirmed by investigators.

A fourth person has died from injuries suffered in an Amtrak train derailment in Missouri, authorities say. The patrol said the person died at University of Missouri Health Center, where some of the injured form Monday’s collision were taken.

The person, whose identity was not released, was passenger on the train travelling from LA to Chicago, the Associated Press reported.

Two other passengers and the driver of a truck were earlier confirmed to have died.

The crossing where an Amtrak train derailed on Monday is among a number of railroad infrastructure locations to be improved, the Kansas City Star reports.

Located in a rural area about 84 miles northeast of Kansas City, the crossing from the collision has no lights or other signals to warn of an approaching train, which local residents and farmers have complained of.

It remains unclear when improvement works were due to begin.

Only about half of all the roughly 3,800 highway-railroad crossings across Missouri are equipped which alarms and other features, the Star said, citing a local action plan.

Missouri’s Department of Transportation’s Office of Multimodal Operations controls rail in the state.

Missouri farmer and local resident Mike Spencer said trains pass though the crossing where the Amtrak derailment occurred at speeds between 45 and 90mph.

While it was unclear at what speed Monday’s derailed Amtrak service was travelling at, a video reportedly posted by Mr Spencer to Facebook earlier this month showed a train “only moving at approximately 45-50 but some come through at anywhere from 70-90 mph,” he wrote.

“If you cross here with a vehicle, stop, approach very slowly, then look both ways. There are two tracks and around 85 trains go through there every day,” the 64-year-old added in an apparent warning to others, according to the Kansas City Star.

The National Transportatation Safety Board (NTSB) are leading the investigation into the Amtrak derailment near Mendon, Missouri, and were expected to have investigators at the scene on Tuesday,

Jennifer Homendy, the chairwoman of the NTSB, told reporters that no trains will run on the track for “a matter of days” while they gather evidence.

A farmer who warned authorities and other Missouri residents of the apparent dangers of the railroad crossing where an Amtrak train derailed on Monday has said it was “a matter of time” before such an incident occurred.

Mike Spencer, 64, said in an interview with the Kansas City Star that promises to upgrade the crossing – which does not have signals or lights – had fallen flat. Nor had the brush been cut back to improve visibility.

A second farmer, 62-year-old Daryl Jacobs, agreed and said: “It needs arms on it or signals”.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has said it will send a 16-member “go team” to investigate the derailment of an Amtrak train near Mendon, Missouri on Monday.

In a news conference on Monday, NTSB chairwoman Jennifer Homendy, who will be part of the team, said the agency is requesting speed data from along the route and on-board recorder logs and camera footage from the train.

“With the team, we’ll have specialists from mechanical, from signal systems from operations and survival factors,” she said. “We’ll have a highway person, a drone operator, and some team members from NTSB’s Office of Transportation Disaster Assistance to work with survivors and families of those who were involved in the derailment….

“”We are requesting information [from] any sort of forward facing or internal facing cameras – that way we can see what was in front of the train or what was going inside on inside the locomotive – as well as any other recorder information that could be provided on the speed of the train at the time of the derailment.

“We’re asking for information on the manifest so we can confirm the number of passengers and the crew members on board,and we’re looking at information on the line and the crossing itself.”

The NTSB is a federal agency that investigates transport accidents, and has probed previous Amtrak derailments in Montana in 2021 and Washington state in 2019.