Something was wrong, Jaime Weatherhead-Saul realized in the seconds before the crash.
Usually, his New Jersey Transit train would slow as it passed through the last tunnel before Hoboken — but the train, packed with its precious freight of morning commuters, was not slowing.
“Ten seconds later we looked around, and we’re like, ‘Wow, we’re still going as fast as when we left Secaucus,” he told The Post.
A moment later, at 8:45 a.m., impact. The lights went out, and smoke and screams filled the train’s first two cars.
“Crash! It was an actual crashing of metal,” Weatherhead-Saul, 31, said of his train ramming through the wall of the terminal.
“We didn’t know if there was an impact or there was an explosion,” he said of the deafening sound. “It was incredible.”
The first two cars had been propelled through the steel and mortar of the terminal wall and onto the concourse, sending hulking beams from the train station’s collapsing roof downward, to pierce through the roof of the train itself.
The men and women who filled the two cars — so many that they stood in the aisles — had been gathering their briefcases and half-sipped coffees in advance of leaving the train.
Now, they lay where they were thrown, some piled onto each other and many bleeding and pinned by fallen beams and debris. “It just threw people from the second car into the first and just threw people on top of each other,” Weatherhead-Saul remembered.
A voice rang out in the dark chaos, maybe the conductor’s, telling people to stay on the train, witnesses said.
Still, “Some people were trying to climb out the windows,” said Charles Frazier, a construction worker from Roselle Park, NJ, who was getting coffee for his co-workers inside the station. “I mean, they just wanted to get off the train.”
Stay on the train, others in the station shouted.
“There were live wires,” Frazier explained. “Everything was live, so they could have gotten electrocuted.”
The passengers, though, continued to pop out the emergency windows, and hobble from the wreckage.
“An old man came out and his entire head was filled with blood,” remembered student Camille Marino, who was heading to a PATH train to get to her job at the World Trade Center. “It was really horrible,” she said.
Weatherhead-Saul looked to his right and saw a struggling young woman.
“Her legs were caught between the two train cars because the second car had kind of jumped up to the first car,” he said. “We managed to pull her up and she was not injured badly. We thought the train might turn in a way that hurt or even amputate her legs but we were so fortunate that we were able to pull her out.”
Inside the terminal, more blood, more chaos.
“People were saying, ‘Oh my God’ and running away,” engineer-in-training William Blaine, 53, who was at a Dunkin’ Donuts inside the commuter-crammed train station.
‘The next thing he knew was that he was thrown from his seat. And people were thrown on top of him. Those seats don’t lock so people were just flying.’
- William Blaine, engineer-in-training
Stay on the train, people in the station shouted. “There were live wires,” Frazier explained. “Everything was live, so they could have gotten electrocuted.”
The passengers continued to pop out the emergency windows, and hobble from the wreckage.
“An old man came out and his entire head was filled with blood,” remembered student Camille Marino, who was heading to a PATH train to get to her job at the World Trade Center. “It was really horrible,” she said.
Inside the terminal, more blood, more chaos.
“People were saying, ‘Oh my God’ and running away,” recalled Blaine, the engineer trainee, who was getting coffee at a Dunkin’ Donuts inside the commuter-crowded train station.
“I immediately had thought a bomb. People were on the ground trying to get up, blood gushing from their heads. I looked a little further and saw the train,” he said. “I ran to help and was telling people to stay back because debris was coming down from the roofs. The ceilings were cracked. We didn’t know if anything else was going to fall down, so I was just guiding people to get out of the way.”
That’s when Blaine saw the body of the woman who, by early afternoon Thursday, was the one confirmed fatality. “It might have been a commuter standing and waiting for the train,” he said of the woman. He touched her and felt no pulse.
Blaine believes the train rammed into the station at about 30 miles an hour. Multiple passengers agreed the train didn’t slow as it reached the station.
“He whispered to me that the train was going faster than usual, and he had a bad feeling,” Mike Stanton said of the call he got from son Daniel, 25, as the son was being taken to the hospital.
“He said the next thing he knew was that he was thrown from his seat,” the dad recounted. “And people were thrown on top of him. Those seats don’t lock so people were just flying.”
Stanton’s son threw out his back but will be all right, the dad said. But the injuries around him once the train came to a skidding stop were grievous.
“He said a woman’s knee was totally turned around,” Stanton told The Post from the ER waiting room at Hoboken University Medical Center.
“I was like, ‘Dan, are you OK?’ ” the dad recalled of the phone call. “I could hear he was hyperventilating . . . He was saying the train was packed all week long, they were short a car.”
Dan was able to walk out of the hospital by early afternoon. “I realized that the train was going way too fast,” he told The Post. “I kinda braced myself for the impact. It didn’t slow down at all. At a certain point you felt each car wobbling back and forth,” he said.
There was a silver lining, he said: “The amazing part was how everyone was helping everyone.”
Additional reporting by Stephanie Pagones