Passenger reacts to Amtrak train derailment: says he’s grateful to walk away unharmed

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

A trip over 2,000 miles was cut short for 275 passengers on board an Amtrak train traveling from Los Angeles to Chicago derailed on Monday.

The train was traveling about a hundred miles out of Kansas City when it hit a dump truck.

There were intense moments of panic for those passengers traveling to different parts of the county.

"I look into one window there is a woman transversing, I'm guessing she was moving between carts when the train derailed so she's buried in dirt and I can tell it was broken and a person was crying next to her," Passenger Antwoine Patton said.

Patton had just gotten a train for the first time in Kansas City, an hour and a half before it derailed. He was traveling to Chicago to catch a train headed to Michigan so he could attend a wedding and he felt what he called a "big rumble."

"We hit a truck and he goes what and next thing you know you just start feeling, it's like the feeling when you start leaning back in a chair and you're hitting the point of no return that was it," he says.

While Patton was boarding the train his seat was moved from the lower level to the upper level of the train due to the lower part of the train's seats being full. He says his seat getting moved changed his outcome of the derailment.

"Only the people on the upper level like me were out, the people on the lower level are still trapped in the train so it just makes the situation a lot worse and me a lot more grateful," Patton said. "I made it out just fine I am able to walk and climb out of this train just easy and there is people that need the jaws of life and stretchers it's just hard to see."

It was easier for people on the top level to get out of the train than those on the lower level Patton said.

"People that were on the lower level they didn't have windows as we did so they were actually trapped, the only way out through the doors and people were standing on the doors on the glass breaking so the fact that I didn't experience that I am very grateful for," he says.

Farmer Mike Spencer owns four miles of land in Mendon along the railroad tracks where the derailment happened. He says he's been trying for nearly a decade to make the area safer.

Spencer says, "There is no crossing arms, the brush is encroaching on the side of the tracks, it is really hard to see the trains till you get right up almost on the tracks because of the brush."

After living in the area for years Spencer says he has never seen anything like this but knew it was going to happen it was just a matter of when since the area is unsafe.

"I was afraid we would, I predicted we would, I had been on the railroad's case for a while," Spencer says. "It was pretty predictable, the writing was on the wall that it was going to be someone probably not familiar with the crossing,"

Passengers were taken to Northwestern K-12 school by bus to figure out a way to their final destination.

Later in the evening buses arrived to transfer passengers to Kansas City and Columbia to stay in hotels overnight.