New York Train Accident Attorneys

Train and subway travel is part of the fabric of everyday life for workers and residents of the New York City metropolitan area, making train accident injuries particularly devastating when they occur. The attorneys at Block O’Toole & Murphy are committed to helping accident victims get the results they need to continue living their lives. Read on to find out how their approach helps victims and about their successful train accident cases, including a $3,925,000 settlement for a victim who was injured while helping a driver stuck on the train tracks.

Need to Know:

• Passenger trains in the United States are publicly owned, which reduces the timeline in which you can take legal action against a railway.
• Train accidents may be handled in state or federal court, depending on the particulars of the accident.
• Obtaining the results of a parallel investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is key to many railway accident cases.

In This Article:

• Why You Have Less Time to Take Legal Action
• Investigating a Train Accident Case
• Case Study: $1,500,000 for Passenger Injured in Commuter Train Crash
• Case Study: $3,925,000 for “Good Samaritan” Rescuer Injured on Train Tracks
• Block O’Toole & Murphy: Unparalleled Dedication in Investigation and Legal Strategy

Why You Have Less Time to Take Legal Action

While rapid action is advisable in all personal injury cases, it can make or break a train accident case. This is because virtually all passenger railroads, or “common carriers,” in the United States are publicly owned—that is, owned by municipal entities. In New York, pursuing legal action against a public entity requires you to file a notice of claim within 90 days—roughly three months—of the incident, and to file a lawsuit within a year and 90 days (fifteen months). Failure to file a notice of claim on time may be used as grounds to dismiss your case.

Several public entities own and operate the passenger trains in New York:

• The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which belongs to the State of New York, owns the Metro-North Railroad, the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), the Staten Island Railway, and the New York City Subway System.
• The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) owns the Port-Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH), AirTrain JFK, and the Jamaica subway and LIRR station.
• The United States Federal Government owns all Amtrak trains.

Regardless of what entity is connected with your accident, it is important to find an attorney who is knowledgeable in train accident litigation. The entity that owns the train will affect where you file your lawsuit, and the location of the accident itself may impact the way the case is carried out. Certain Amtrak cases, for example, fall under federal jurisdiction and could be solved in federal, as opposed to state, court (if, for example, a train departed from one state, and the accident occurred in a different state). An experienced attorney will be able to quickly sort out the best approach for your case.

Investigation in Train Accident Cases

Proving another party responsible for your accident requires prompt and thorough investigation. The attorneys at Block O’Toole & Murphy prioritize immediate investigation, often traveling to the scene of an accident on the very day that they sign a case. In railroad accidents, we seek information such as witness statements, “black box” data available on board the train, and any communications between personnel that may have been recorded at the time of, or immediately following, the crash.

Early investigation gives our attorneys, and the investigators they retain, the opportunity to seek testimony while it is still fresh in the minds of witnesses and collect evidence before it is cleaned up or otherwise tampered with. It also gives us a firsthand, big-picture understanding of the accident which is highly valuable in mediation and at trial.

While undertaking a thorough investigation ourselves, we also make note of parallel investigations. One of our first orders of business in a train accident is to gain access to the investigative report by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) as soon as it is available. The NTSB is an independent government agency responsible for investigating transportation accidents, including railroad accidents, in the United States. As such, they send an investigative team to the scene immediately following an accident, and are granted near-immediate access to sources of information critical to the case, such as data boxes and controls aboard the train. Serving a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request for the NTSB investigative report as soon as it is reasonable to do so has proved pivotal to many cases.

Case Study: $1,500,000 for Passenger Injured in Commuter Train Crash

Block O’Toole & Murphy handled a case on behalf of a New York County Supreme Court clerk who was commuting on an NJ Transit train that crashed into the Hoboken Terminal. Of the 114 passengers injured in this incident, our client had the misfortune of being in the first car of the train when it occurred, placing him among those that suffered the severest impact. He emerged with serious injuries to his neck, back, shoulders, right knee, and right hand.

Our client’s suffering was extensive and life-altering. He required surgery to repair a number of tears to his knee and faced excruciating shoulder pain which proved chronic, unrelieved by physical and injection therapy. Most devastating, however, was the injury to his dominant hand. Despite an aggressive course of occupational therapy following a surgery that prevented the necessity of amputation, he developed a series of complications which included contracture of the thenar muscles. The contracting of these muscles recurred despite additional surgery intended to release the tendons, severely limiting the strength and range of motion in his hand. 

The complications from his injuries, together with a new fear of public transportation, soon forced our client to retire from his clerking job—a career from which he had had no intention of retiring, as his children were still young. Unsurprisingly, he was subsequently diagnosed with general anxiety, major depression, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

As soon as it was available, our handling attorneys gained access to the NTSB report on the accident. The NTSB investigation determined that the accident had been caused by a case of undiagnosed sleep apnea—a sleep disorder which causes sufferers to wake multiple times over the course of the night, leading to low-quality sleep.

Like many sufferers, the conductor of the train was unaware that he had sleep apnea and was unable to recall what had caused the accident to occur. As it turned out, he had briefly dozed off at the controls, leading to the crash.

Armed with this knowledge, our handling attorneys set out to demonstrate that the medical screening procedure used by NJ Transit would, if undertaken successfully, have diagnosed the engineer’s sleep apnea before he was put in a position to operate the train. We successfully did so, settling the case for $1,500,000 on behalf of our client.

Case Study: $3,925,000 for “Good Samaritan” Rescuer Injured on Train Tracks

In another railroad case we handled, our client was a body mechanic who worked near a railroad crossing in Queens. One day, stepping outside of the shop where he worked, he saw a tractor trailer struggling to get off the rails. The driver had become stuck while attempting to reverse over the tracks, and the crossing gates had come down on top of his vehicle. Aware that a train was rapidly approaching, our client raced out to the railroad tracks to help the driver, whose door was jammed. Our client succeeded in opening the door and freeing the trapped driver, but before he himself could escape, the oncoming train struck the truck. The impact caused the tractor trailer to flip over and pin our client to the track, dragging him over 70 feet.

The New York City Fire Department dug a trench into the ground in order to free him, much to the relief of his coworkers, who, upon arriving at the scene, had initially believed him to be dead. Our client was comatose for weeks, hospitalized for months, and suffered fractures which required multiple surgeries.

Upon taking the case, Partner Stephen J. Murphy and Senior Associate Christina Mercado filed lawsuits against the truck driver whose life our client had saved and the company that had hired him as a delivery driver. We alleged that the tractor trailer became stuck because of the truck driver’s negligent actions, ranging from failing to comply with nearby signage reading “No Stopping on the Tracks” to attempting to drive the tractor trailer over the tracks in reverse. Incredibly, the defense countered that our client had acted voluntarily in attempting to rescue the defendant, that his behavior had been reckless, and that he alone was responsible for his own injuries.

It was clear to our handling attorneys that, far from being reckless, our client had reacted to reckless behavior by taking rapid action to help another person, without hesitating to assure his own safety in a way that might have proved fatal to the driver. The law recognizes such selflessness through the danger invites rescue doctrine, which we cited on behalf of our client. According to this legal principle, if an individual is negligent in such a way as to create a need for rescue, that individual has thereby invited rescue, and cannot claim that the rescue was unwanted to evade legal consequence after the fact.

But the driver and his employers were not the only defendants that Murphy and Mercado faced. Multiple witnesses to the accident had claimed that the approaching Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) train, with adequate time to slow down, had failed to do so. Our handling attorneys knew from the outset of the case that their client’s injuries—the life-altering repercussions of which included chronic pain and loss of income due to persistent inability to work—were worthy of significant restitution, more than the $1 million that the insurance associated with the tractor trailer would be able to provide.

Any good personal injury attorney would, at this point, have sought black box data from the train itself in order to confirm its speed, as well as accident reconstruction experts whose analysis could speak to the truth or untruth of what these witnesses were claiming. Murphy and Mercado took things even further. They persuaded a court to temporarily shut down the portion of the railroad where our client had been injured, allowing the expert they retained to conduct a test simulation in order to determine what could, and could not, be seen by the train’s operator.

Shutting down a portion of a major railroad, even for a few hours, is an expensive proposition—one for which our firm had to shoulder a portion of the cost. Our handling attorneys did not undertake this strategy lightly, but with the understanding that it was necessary in order to do right by their client.

By applying an understanding of the perception/reaction time required for someone with a train operator’s professional training, our reconstruction expert was able to prove that the operator had ample opportunity to slow the train down, which would have significantly minimized the impact of the collision.

This painstaking reconstruction also helped to demonstrate that the Long Island Rail Road’s experts were using misplaced sight lines in their analysis of the accident, meaning that their testimony was based on flawed data. Because of these extra efforts by our attorneys, we were able to settle the case for a total of $3,925,000—nearly four million dollars—on behalf of our client, to which both the LIRR and the truck driver’s insurance company contributed.

Block O’Toole & Murphy: Unparalleled Dedication in Investigation and Legal Strategy

Rapid investigation is critical in passenger train accidents, which need to be assessed on short timelines in order to meet filing deadlines. The commitment to immediate investigation which characterizes our firm does not compromise the thoroughness of our approach.

Because train accident cases are relatively rare, they require experienced attorneys with a reputation that common carriers will respect. They also require attorneys who think outside the box when it comes to getting the necessary results. Consider the lengths we went to on behalf of our “good Samaritan” client injured on the train tracks. Rather than merely accept the insurance payout from the tractor trailer, we did everything we felt was necessary to prove to the LIRR that our client’s injury was preventable, even to the degree of arranging for a temporary shutdown of the railroad in order to effectively make our point. 

If you or a loved one has been injured in a train accident, the attorneys at Block O’Toole & Murphy are here to help. We serve all five boroughs of New York City as well as the entirety of New York State. Contact the skilled attorneys at Block O’Toole & Murphy by calling 212-736-5300, or by filling out our online contact form.