The more than 200 passengers on Amtrak train No. 59 had mostly been strangers.
They had been thinking about dinner plans for a New Orleans vacation, a sister’s funeral in Atlanta or the start of a new semester at school. They came from homes as far apart as Portland, Ore., Jackson, Miss., and Chicago.
But when the train shook and jolted and finally came to its sudden, violent stop, the group would be forever linked by the images they had shared, they said in interviews Tuesday.
A young woman reached out to clasp the hand of the stranger she had been riding beside.
A man clenched shut his eyes and prayed to God.
A woman called out to her elderly mother, “Momma, Momma,” but got no answer.
Jacqueline Sheard, 21, had been watching the movie in her car when the train began rocking back and forth. The lights flashed on, then off. Seats were ripped from their bases. People flew from their seats.
Sheard, a senior at Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena, fell to the floor and hit her head against someone. She clung to a seat.
Then a pungent burning smell seeped in, and people began to scream.
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“It was total chaos,” Sheard said. “There was smoke and fire everywhere.
“I’m just glad to be alive.”
More than 100 people were injured.
Not everyone was as fortunate. As family members grieved for the 13 people who died in the accident, others waited for news. At least three people still were missing late Tuesday, including Sheena Dowe, 22, according to her family.
Dowe, a Chicagoan who attends college in Jackson, Miss., was traveling with her toddler son, Amause, and her godsister, Shalaine Johnson.
Johnson, 24, said they had been riding in the dining car when Dowe got up to use the bathroom in the sleeping car, one car over.
“She left to go and use the bathroom, and that’s when the accident happened,” Johnson said. “She was in the bathroom. I haven’t heard from her since.
“I looked outside, and all I saw was fire. I had her son and my two sons with me. . . . So I was just trying to get us out of there. Then we got out and jumped out. But she never came out.”
Officials would not release names of the dead or missing on Tuesday. But Dowe’s young son kept asking for his mother, Johnson said.
“I tell him it’s going to be okay. We are going to get her,” she said. “She’s going to come back later.”
As that family waited for word at a Kankakee hotel Tuesday night, other passengers emerged from hospitals, called friends and met quietly with family members. They recalled the moments they spent in the dark.
Because of the way the derailment occurred, the experience was starkly different depending on what car a passenger was in. In some cars, passengers felt as if they had simply come to a stop.
One passenger thought perhaps the train had hit a deer. Another thought nothing was wrong at all and wondered when Amtrak would get the wheels rolling again. In other cars, people clutched their seats, passengers flying past them. Some cars were full of smoke.
Rev. Luther Stevison, 72, of Memphis, Tenn., had been in Chicago visiting relatives. He was in a sleeping car, on the bottom bunk, and was just about ready to fall asleep when “all of a sudden, I felt this bump and the train started shaking and I was hugging and holding onto my bed, thinking, `What the heck is happening.’
“It was twisting around, and then I heard a boom, boom and I started praying to the Lord to take care of me. I was bounced around, but I didn’t fall out.”
Andrea Shidle, a 20-year-old painting major at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, had been playing cards with her father when the jolt came. Her mother was sitting one row forward.
“It was like turbulence and I thought, `Oh well it’ll just straighten back out,’ ” said the Palatine native. “We’re running over something. . . . Then suddenly it got worse. I reached out for my mother, and then the lights went out.”
Shidle and her father escaped through a window. They didn’t find her mother until two hours later, when they all were treated at the same hospital.
“The whole thing was like a dream or a movie,” said Marcus Sykes, 19, of Chicago.
He remembered a girl running down the aisle in his car. She cried out for her mother. No one knew what to do.
“The train just started shaking, the lights went off,” Sykes said. “It was like a roller coaster ride . . . throwing back and forth.”
A woman beside Sykes vanished.
“Her seat just broke,” Sykes said. “She tumbled in front of me. She just tumbled away.”