Metrolink 111 was right on time.
The commuter train pulled out of Union Station just after 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 12, 2008, carrying mostly workers and college students heading home on a Friday afternoon.
An engineer and a conductor, both contracted through Connex Railroad, were at the reins as the train rolled northwest through the San Fernando Valley on its way to the Moorpark station on the Ventura County rail line.
Though he knew he was prohibited from using his cell phone while in the locomotive’s cab, 46-year-old engineer Robert Sanchez, throughout the journey, texted a friend, a teenager from Chatsworth who loved trains. Twice before, federal records show, he had been spotted on the phone and warned.
Sanchez apparently didn’t notice the yellow signal, before pulling into the Chatsworth station, telling him he might need to stop up ahead. Or the red one just beyond that station and before the route switches from two tracks to one.
He was to stop and wait, giving up the single track.
This train tunnel is near the site of the crash in Chatsworth, CA.(photo by Andy Holzman) Barreling eastbound was the Leesdale Local, a Union Pacific freight train. Emerging from a tunnel, its crew spotted Metrolink 111 – and engaged the emergency brakes two seconds before impact.
At 4:22 p.m., Metrolink 111 collided with the Leesdale Local, each train traveling at about 40 mph.
Passengers, emergency officials and locals rushed to the mangled metal and fire to help. Dazed and bloodied victims wandered away from the three coaches. Bodies had to be pulled from the twisted wreckage.
In all, 25 were killed, including Sanchez. None of the dead were from the freight train. And 135 others were injured.
A decade later, the area is again pristine, here on a bend in this part of Chatsworth, a corner of rustic Stoney Point Park and over the fence from a school. Plenty of pain remains, but at least changes were made to reduce the odds that such a tragedy will ever happen again.
‘Blood on their hands’
Kipp Landis just has to turn his right forearm for a reminder. A long scar marks where his surgeon cut into his wrist to put shattered bones back together again.
The doctor told him the effect of the impact was similar to what would have happened if he had fallen off of a three-story building directly onto his wrist.
“He did five hours of surgery,” Landis said. “He told me it was just like putting baby powder back together.”
Years, and hundreds of physical therapy sessions later, Landis was able to regain half of the strength in his forearm.
A 52-year-old lawyer and longtime planning commissioner for Moorpark, he was one of the few to survive Metrolink 111’s first passenger car. The crash telescoped the train’s locomotive into that car, pushing a wall of metal two-thirds of the way through.
Kipp Landis, 52, is a longtime Moorpark resident and member of the city’s planning commission. He was among the only survivors riding in the first passenger car of the Metrolink train that crashed head-on into a freight train in Chatsworth in 2008. In total, 25 people were killed in that crash and hundreds were injured. Landis was left with extensive injuries — his left wrist and right arm were shattered. He broke two bones in his back. All of his ribs were broken, and he suffered internal injuries to his heart and lungs.(photo by Andy Holzman) Besides his wrist, many bones in Landis’ upper body were broken – every rib, two bones in his back, his shoulder, and his right arm.
Throughout his recovery, Landis marked milestones, such as being able to throw a baseball again at a Pepperdine University alumni game.
“I now sort of tell history and time based on the event,” he said. “Was it before the accident, or after the accident?”
Keith Millhouse was a member of the Metrolink board representing Ventura County when the collision occurred. He was elected chairman three months later.
Improving Metrolink, to ensure a similar crash could never happen again, consumed his life for years.
He counts Landis as a good friend and knows the mother of Maria Elena Villalobos, an 18-year-old student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in downtown L.A. who was killed.
“It was absolutely a gut punch to both Simi Valley and Moorpark,” said Millhouse, now 58. “It hit so hard, and so close to home.”
Improvements on the railway
Every weekday, about 20,000 people from all over Southern California hop aboard the 25-year-old rail service’s trains, often for the long commutes to and from work. Last fiscal year, Metrolink’s budget was $243 million, about 35 percent of that coming from fares. The rest was paid through subsidies from L.A., Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura counties.
Like other railways, Metrolink was slow to adopt positive train control, technology that both Millhouse and National Transportation Safety Board officials said could have prevented the Chatsworth crash.
The crash prompted the NTSB to set a deadline for all passenger trains and freight trains carrying hazardous materials to install positive train control by 2015. Metrolink met that deadline in June of that year. According to Millhouse, that set the standard for other railways to do so across the nation. Some railways have continued to request delays. The current deadline is this December.
Keith Millhouse became the chairman of the Metrolink board three months after the 2008 train crash in Chatsworth that killed 25 people and injured hundreds more. Millhouse, a longtime Moorpark city councilman, said he knew many residents who were on the train who died or were injured, as well as families of the victims who were left with questions whether Metrolink was taking safety seriously enough. His connection to the city and the victims led him to devote much of his time in the years after the crash to ensuring that a similar tragedy would never happen again..(photo by Andy Holzman) Here is how positive train control works:
Now, Metrolink’s system links onboard computers on each of its trains with its communication network, allowing its dispatch centers and centralized computer system to know the locations of all of its locomotives. That helps the system predict if a collision is about to occur.
And the onboard computers can take over automatically if an engineer stops responding to warnings of an impending crash, or if the train is going too fast.
Union Pacific followed, in 2017, adopted the system for all of the tracks it shares with Metrolink trains.
Other safety upgrades were adopted immediately after the Chatsworth crash. Millhouse pushed for the installation of cameras in every locomotive cab to ensure engineers weren’t distracted. And signals across the region were replaced with brighter LED lights.
Before the Chatsworth collision, after a 2005 crash in Glendale, Metrolink replaced its fleet of cars with new models featuring crumple zones, areas at the front and rear of the car designed to absorb the force of a collision. The Chatsworth crash also led Metrolink to install tables that crumple more easily, after more rigid tables crushed the abdomens of some victims in the 2008 collision.
The technology to automate some processes of the tracking and operating of trains had been around for decades. But many railways balked at the cost, leading to a delay that attorney Ron Goldman, a partner at Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman, which represented some of the Metrolink crash victims, called “outrageous.”
Goldman said the reason for delays came down to prioritizing money over the lives of passengers.
“Every time they (ask for a delay), there’s blood on their hands,” Goldman said.
(In 2011, a judge approved a $200 million settlement for 122 families and individuals affected by the Chatsworth crash.)
Millhouse said finding other railways refusing to attack the problem with the same “tenacity” as Metrolink was frustrating: “People have died as a result.”
Despite satisfaction with his eight years on the Metrolink board, the Chatsworth accident has haunted Millhouse.
“I just somehow wish that everything could be reset and we could change the outcome,” he said. “That’s what’s frustrating. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about the people on the train, and the victims and their families.”
‘Every time you heard the train, you jumped’
That afternoon, Carol Shibel was one of three staff members still at Chatsworth Hills Academy, that school over the fence, which serves pre-kindergarten through eighth grade on a sprawling campus with ample green spaces and small wood buildings.
A field at the school became a makeshift triage area, where injured passengers were taken. The campus itself became a temporary command center for 24 hours.
For about one year, students were not allowed to use the field — officials feared the ground was hazardous from the blood of the wounded.
A recent day, through a line of trees on a small hill on the campus, Shibel pointed to the crash site — 10 years ago, it was easier to see, when the trees were still small. A whistle sounded from an approaching train, and a Union Pacific freight train rumbled by.
Carol Shibel was working at Chatsworth Hills Academy when the crash occurred. “For a while (after), every time you heard the train, you jumped,” she said. (Photo by Andy Holzman) On the day of the crash, Shibel, a math teacher, sat with about 20 students inside a building on campus for an hour, trying to keep them calm while not revealing too much about what had just happened. Another teacher went to the triage area and sat with victims for hours.
“It’s hard, it’s extremely hard,” said Shibel, who now is the middle school principal in addition to teaching math. “For a while, every time you heard the train, you jumped.”
Mitch Englander, then a chief of staff for L.A. Councilman Greig Smith and a reserve police officer, was one of the nearby residents who went to the scene after hearing a massive explosion.
He and a friend jumped a wall separating homes from the tracks. They found the fiery freight train and the mangled Metrolink 111, and victims pleading for help.
“It was just chaos,” Englander said. “There were bodies strewn everywhere. People were stuck in the train and screaming.”
Englander and others rushed to the Metrolink train and began pulling victims, dead and alive, from the wreckage. As they found the bodies of the dead, they set up an area to place them until the coroner could get there. Some prayed over the bodies and administered last rites.
For the first year after the crash, Englander was often unable to sleep through the night, and he obsessively searched online for information about each of the dead.
In recent weeks, Englander has been reaching out to families of those victims to invite them to a memorial on Wednesday at a three-acre horse ranch in the shadow of Stoney Point, just south of the site of the collision.
The conversations have been emotional, he said, and recounting his memories of the day have brought back intense feelings.
“The imagery is so vivid,” he said. “It’s not just telling a story of something that happened. It feels like it happened last night.”
Metrolink
1988-1990: Residents of Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura counties pass a series of sales-tax measures to fund rail improvements and new projects. L.A., O.C. and San Bernardino countries purchase 173 miles of right-of-way from the Southern Pacific Railroad.
1991: The five counties choose the name Metrolink.
Oct. 26, 1992: Metrolink service begins. Routes on three lines are offered — the Ventura County, San Bernardino and Santa Clarita lines.
June 1993: Metrolink opens the Riverside Line.
March 1994: The Orange County Line opens as the longest line in the system.
October 1995: The Inland Empire-Orange County Line opens, with officials calling it the nation’s first suburb-to-suburb line..
2002: The 91 Line, from Riverside to downtown L.A. through Fullerton, opens.
Jan. 26, 2005: 11 people die when a Metrolink train collides with an SUV left at an at-grade crossing in Glendale. Metrolink begins developing train cars with crush zones and other technology to mitigate collisions.
Sept. 12, 2008: A Metrolink train and a Union Pacific freight train crash head-on in Chatsworth, killing 25 people and injury many others. The crash is the worst train collision in modern California history, and results in state and federal legislation mandating safety upgrades.
Feb. 24, 2015: 30 people are injured when a Metrolink train collides with a truck near Oxnard.
June 2015: Metrolink becomes the first rail system in the country to adopt positive train control across an entire network of tracks.