Editor’s note: This article was updated at 3:07 p.m.
BRATTLEBORO — A 26-year-old Brattleboro man was killed and a companion was injured Sunday after they stepped onto a railroad bridge and found themselves in the path of Amtrak’s daily Vermonter passenger train.
The two were walking along the elevated tracks that span over the confluence of the Connecticut and West rivers when a southbound locomotive blew its whistle and tried to brake, according to authorities.
Rescue workers transported Nicholas O. Widomski to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, where he died from unspecified injuries, police said. Harrison H. Johnson, 22, of Marlboro sustained minor wounds and was released after treatment.
The Vermonter, which runs from St. Albans to Washington, D.C., was scheduled to reach downtown Brattleboro just past the bridge at 12:34 p.m., but was running a half-hour late, Amtrak spokesman Craig Schulz said. The train stopped after the accident around 1 p.m. and started up again about 2 p.m.
None of the 45 passengers reported injuries, Amtrak said.
Archer Mayor, a nationally known mystery writer from nearby Newfane, worked the area Sunday in his second job as an investigator for the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Mayor couldn’t say anything publicly about the accident. But readers of his Joe Gunther series know the author is familiar with the rusting bridge that’s featured in his 2009 novel “The Price of Malice.”
“Neither one of them saw or heard the train,” Mayor wrote in that book. “It was on them … like a mechanical nightmare, in the proverbial blink of an eye. All noise and blur and heart-stopping surprise.”
Brattleboro police strung yellow crime scene tape along and under the tracks as they took photos and measurements as part of an investigation. Amtrak, confirming the train “made contact with an individual,” is helping with the effort, its spokesman said.
The train death is the second in Windham County in recent years. In January 2012, a 15-year-old Vernon boy died on a track crossing near his home at dusk after he was struck by the northbound Vermonter that had just passed the state’s southern border.
On Sunday, Amtrak service was back on schedule when a northbound train arrived in downtown Brattleboro shortly after 5 p.m.
“It happens all the time,” an employee at the station said of the accident. “People just don’t know enough to stay off the tracks.”
Kevin O’Connor, a former staffer of the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, is a Brattleboro-based writer. Email: kevinoconnorvt@gmail.com
