A sharp left turn, then muffled screams
Arnie Peterson's evening train, the Metrolink 111, banked to the left, toward the coast. The work week, and the metropolis, faded behind him.
He and his fellow travelers were a motley crew: a lawyer with tasseled loafers; a young man with a shaved head and the words "KICK ASS" emblazoned on his shirt; Peterson, a 47-year-old cement worker for the city of Burbank, clad in his orange work shirt, headed home to Simi Valley after another long day.
Normally, they would probably never be in the same room, but 10 times a week -- once in the morning, once in the evening, five days a week -- they were together.
Theirs was an odd kinship. Many of them had communicated for years with little more than nods, yet they were so respectful that they wouldn't think of stealing one another's favorite seats, so trusting that when they had to use the restroom, they would leave cellphones and briefcases on their seats without second thought.
Peterson was staring out the window, "thinking," he said, "about how it was Friday."
The terror, for some, began before impact. The left turn in the tracks, just above the Northridge-Chatsworth station, is very sharp. So commuters sitting by the windows on the left side could see the Union Pacific freight train headed straight for them.
"My first thought was: I'm not seeing this," said Albert Cox, 53, a regular rider who had boarded the train in Burbank and was on his way home to Simi Valley.
It was clear they could not stop soon enough. There was time for a few muffled screams before they hit.
Peterson found himself flying through the air, over six rows of seats. He is not, he pointed out, a small man.
Everything and everyone, for a moment, seemed airborne. Some of the tables, torn from their moorings, turned into missiles, hurtling toward the front of the train.
Cox was thrown from his seat -- there are no seat belts, since Metrolink trains are not designed for sudden stops -- and landed on a table, breaking it in two. "The table won," he said. Peterson was thrown, with 20 others, against one wall of the train.
Suddenly, but for black oil seeping from the freight train and black smoke billowing from the impact site, everything stopped moving.
"It was dead quiet," Peterson said.
Slowly, the sound built again -- moaning, then screaming. Phil Thiele, 55, of Simi Valley, who had boarded the train at Van Nuys, had been sitting in the back of the first passenger car. Now he looked up into the face of a man who was pinned between collapsed seats.
