Eyewitness Account of MBTA Boylston Street Crash

By Ekaterina Bylkina 11-29-2012 

At 11:50 a.m. I went down the Boylston T stop to travel outbound on the Green Line and saw a B-line train sitting at the stop. Then I heard an MBTA worker, a middle-aged female, instructing passengers to leave the train. 

I witnessed passengers coming out, however some were still sitting inside because they were injured. MBTA workers were running around the
platform. Some had flashlights and were checking under two trains.
The train drivers were talking to each other and coming from
one train car to another. They looked worried. Five minutes later the  same MBTA worker asked the remaining commuters to get out of the train. And I saw an old lady who had two young women holding her straight up and helping
her to step down from the train. The pants on her right leg were folded up. Her knee looked big and was so swollen that she couldn’t move it properly. She was pale. One MBTA worker called for an ambulance, and soon EMT personnel arrived with stretchers.

At the same time other MBTA workers rushed to the end of the train and I finally saw that there is another train in the tunnel. They escorted people from the second train from the dark tunnel. Rescue workers and firefighters with huge metal bulks came in and went into the tunnel.

I was in the Boylston Street station around 15 minutes when police asked everyone to leave and go to the Arlington T stop which is farther down Boylston Street.

I left and I saw that there were four or five ambulance cars outside and a couple of fire cars parked outside. An enormous number of police were coming onto the scene. However, inside the station it was all calm, people were completely under control. There was no fire, nor smell. The two
trains were standing too close to each other, so it didn’t look normal.

At that time nobody knew what exactly had happened and why. It looked like the first B-line train was in the proper place at the station. Usually if there are trains waiting in line, the second train will be at least 164 feet away, around the corner. Passengers usually can see the lights of the second train but not the train itself.

In this situation, the second train might have done something wrong, arrived too early and crashed into the first B-line train.