Today is December 1st, 2025, marking the 12th anniversary of Metro-North’s December 1, 2013 Spuyten Duyvil derailment. I decided to commemorate the anniversary, I’d take a look back at this disaster and what went wrong.It all started at 5:55am on Sunday, December 1st, 2013 when train #8808 powered up out of a dark Poughkeepsie station on a clear Sunday morning, headed towards Grand Central Terminal. The train then proceeded south along the scenic yet dark Hudson Line, making most intermediate stops along the Hudson Line before the start of electrified territory at Croton-Harmon, where it then proceeded south to Ossining before running express to make it’s station stop at Tarrytown, just after dawn, which was the final intermediate stop before running express to Manhattan.
After finishing it’s Tarrytown stop, the train proceeded south for another 14 miles, passing by a couple more stations in Westchester County, before entering the Bronx. The train had 126 passengers aboard, including many heading back into the city after seeing family upstate for Thanksgiving, and many others heading in early for events in the city, and 4 crew members.
Soon after entering the Bronx and passing by Riverdale station, the engineer, William Rockefeller of Germantown, NY should have applied brakes in anticipation of the upcoming curve before Spuyten Duvyil station, however, instead, he later said this:
“I don't know how to explain it… it was sort of like I was dazed, you know, looking straight ahead, almost like mesmerized. And I don’t know if anybody’s ever experienced like driving a long period of time in a car and staring at the taillights in front of them, and you almost get like that Hyponotic feeling staring straight ahead…. I was just staring straight ahead.. It was that hypnotized feeling, dazed, thats what I was feeling.”
Linda Smith of Newburgh, who had boarded at Beacon with her sister to see a performance at Lincoln Center, later recalled that she while not fully awake, felt that something was off. “It was bumpy and seemed really at that point I was aware of going to fast”. Rockfeller initiated the emergency breaks just seconds before the train took the curve.
At 7:19 a.m, the train derailed just 100 yards north of Spuyten Duyvil station, just after it had crossed the junction with the West Side Line’s crossing over Spuyten Duvyil Bridge where Amtrak trains went to go into Penn Station. It was a violent derailment, with Linda Smith saying that she felt the train “turned sideways as bumps gave way to bounces and seat cushions flew through the air. It was like a movie going on around me”. Another passenger, Joel Zartisky of LeGrangeville, NY who was headed to a convention claimed it was “like severe turbulence on an airplane”.
When the train finally stopped Hermann despite head injuries and severe bruising took full charge and reported the derailment to the dispatcher before working with the asst. conductor Kelly to coordinate the passenger evacuation. In the front, engineer Rockfeller, who was mostly unharmed, freed conductor Maria Herbert who was up at the front with him and was conscious but had suffered a head injury and was trapped underneath the seat cushions who gave her a head injury.
Once emergency services reached the scene and began helping injured passengers evacuate, they realized that all 7 cars and the locomotive all left the tracks. One of the cars got dangerously close to the river.
In the end, four people were killed, including Linda Smith’s sister who along with two others, got thrown from the train.
Response to the scene was huge as the New York City fire department sent over 125 firefighters to assist in the rescue. Unfortunately, rescue operations were slower than what was hoped because EMS workers were delayed on getting to some people trapped inside the train due to the third rail needing to be de-energized.
For the rest of the day, service on the Hudson Line was suspended entirely south of Croton-Harmon. This was detrimental, given that this occurred on what is known as the busy travel day of the year. They were able to get service back up and running as far as Yonkers for the Monday morning rush hour on the first weekday after Thanksgiving, where they provided shuttle busses to the Van Cortland Park-242 St station, the northern terminus of the No. 1 train headed into Manhattan. They also provided various other shuttle busses to other stations, such as White Plains.
MTA crews worked around the clock to remove the wreckage and repair tracks as quickly as possible. By the evening of December 2nd, just a day afterward, all cars were re-railed and were taken to Highbridge and Croton-Harmon yards to be impounded by the NTSB for further investigations.
By the morning of Wednesday, December 4th, Metro-North was able to get one of the three tracks of the Hudson Line through the accident site back up and running, allowing for limited service into Manhattan (through combined trains). It’s said that passengers waiting at Poughkeepsie (waiting for the same train as the accident train) actually were impressed with how quickly Metro-North was able to get service running and that they had actually shown sympathy for Rockfeller, who at the time, probably really needed it. While people weren’t afraid of the incident reoccuring, one women was surprised that there were no fail safe systems in place to prevent this: “after all this is the United States”.
Soon after, the NTSB began a massive investigation of the incident. Like with most disasters, they started with the event data recorder which determined that the train was travelling a whopping 82 mph when it crashed; 52 mph above the 30 mph speed limit put in place. Rockefeller also later surrendered his cell phone and submitted to drug tests and they concluded that he had been well-rested and his tests came back negative for alcohol and drugs. But, when asked what might have caused it, he claimed he felt he had drifted into a “daze” until just before the incident where he snapped out of it and applied the breaks.
Anthony Bottalico, head of the Metro-North union stated that Rockefeller had “nodded off” before the incident, similarizing it to “white line fever” a phenomenon experienced by truckers, and added that Rockfeller had only just recently began working the morning shift after reluctantly transitioning from an afternoon one, which likely could have contributed to his tiredness had he not gotten a full night’s sleep. And while said to be alert that morning, he said to the conductor
The NTSB concluded that the lack of PTC in the Cab Car, where Rockfeller was operating the train could have prevented the incident which started because of Rockfeller’s .
In the end, the derailment caused over $9 million in damage. It was the deadliest train accident in NYC since a 1991 subway derailment in Manhattan and was the first incident to involve passenger facilities in Metro-North’s 30 year history and it showed the repercussions of not having PTC installed onboard trains which most likely could have prevented this disaster. However, it was lesson learned and this disaster lead to the full implementation of PTC on both Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road.
