This week in Philly history, a subway derailment kills 4 and injures hundreds in SEPTA’S deadliest disaster
One car, a witness told The Inquirer, was “twisted like a pretzel” after the March 7, 1990, derailment on the Market-Frankford Line.
A little after 8:20 a.m., a packed Market-Frankford El train pulled out of 30th Street Station, headed away from Center City with about 180 passengers.
Just as the six-car train picked up speed and its rush-hour passengers sipped their coffee and read their newspapers, the motor under the third car dropped. The motor dragged along the rails and tore up wooden railroad ties before it tripped a track switch at a fork in the railway.
The train jolted, the lights flickered, and the fourth car flipped sideways on March 7, 1990.
The fourth car slammed into the tunnel’s steel support columns, and passengers tumbled around the cars as if they were in a clothes dryer until the turbulence settled and the screams for help commenced.
“A beam came right in the train,” conductor Steven Young told The Inquirer.
Above ground, a mid-20s chill paired with a vibrant early-March morning and the sky beamed blue.
Below ground, the air was damp and freezing, and a furious haze gathered above the chewed metal and flying glass and spreading blood.
The fourth car, a witness told The Inquirer, was “twisted like a pretzel.”
The fifth derailed and leaned to the left against the subterranean tunnel walls, and the derailed sixth leaned right.
When a police officer made his way through the cars, he told the passengers to “start praying,” The Inquirer reported.
For nearly five hours, rescue workers freed the trapped and removed the injured. And the last person to be extracted pulled a Life Saver from his pocket and gifted it to a firefighter.
In total, four passengers were killed and 158 were injured.
A yearlong review followed the disaster, and it led federal investigators to conclude that improper installation and inspection of a traction motor system on the third car caused the crash.
Derailments are exceedingly rare on the city’s subway lines. Prior to 1990, the last derailment was in 1961, when the line was operated by a different entity and a four-car El train derailed heading into York-Dauphin Station. One passenger was killed and 35 were injured. The Pennsylvania legislature would go on to create SEPTA in 1963.
And a derailment wouldn’t happen again until 2017, when an El train derailed and crashed into a stopped train, seriously injuring one of the operators but resulting in zero deaths.
Leaving the 1990 derailment as the deadliest crash in SEPTA’s history.