Fire on the CTA blue line

[Guest keio6000]

Hello all,

 

I took a trip to Chicago last Friday and took the Blue Line metro from O'Hare Airport.  About 2 minutes after leaving O'Hare and before arriving at the next station, I was taking out my iPad when I heard another passenger exclaim that it appeared that a train passing ours was 'sparking.'    It soon became clear that the sparks were from our train, not the passing train, and within moments the side of our train erupted in fire, with the fire starting from a location within about a meter of where I was sitting.  While the fire was on the outside of the train and largely held outside by the stainless steel body of the car, smoke began to enter and the 12 of us on the car had to duck down a bit to evacuate towards the rear of the train.  Somebody must have pushed the emergency stop button as eventually the train slowed down and stopped, but before it did and as it was going pretty slowly, a few people opened the doors manually to let the smoke vent out and one or two people may have jumped out at slow speed.  The train came to a stop and we waited for about 10 minutes on the train and then were led by CTA staff to climb down off the train.  From there, it was a matter of waiting for emergency personnel to do their work and then waiting for buses to pick us up. All in the snow.  What a mess!

 

Fortunately, nobody got hurt.  However, I read a number of news reports about it the next day and it is amazing how wrong many of them were.   For example, many described no smoke entering the car, which is nonsense..  there was a lot of smoke.  They probably interviewed people sitting forward of the fire area.   Apparently also some people in other cars panicked a bit, but there was no panic as we evacuated our, most affected car--however, we had to tell people further towards the back of the train (that is, away from the fire) to keep moving as a  lot of people would just stop once they were safe, not thinking that this would impact people behind them. 

 

The train was fortunately lightly loaded.  I want to also say that even the homeless people on the train acted responsibly and sensibly during the thing.  All in all, a small affair, though not quite as small as the CTA spokesperson and media news outlets made it out to be.

 

There was no 'noise' as the sparks were flying that i recall, so I think it was caused by a short or fault in the under body electrical equipment.

 

Meanwhile, nearly simultaneously, my wife was on a PKP polish railways train that hit and killed somebody and was delayed for several hours due to this.

 

 

[cteno4]

Wow what an adventure! Glad all made it out safe ans sound.

 

Always amazed how emergencies are reported when you have been in the middle of them!

 

I was once involved in going into the Potomac after a car that went into the river. Evening news had the story totally wrong!

 

Jeff

Edited January 16, 2014 by cteno4