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Association, and he was to direct emergency medical services at the accident site.
Then Lomax called again at 7:40. He said the train had derailed, and we hauled freight,” Sanders said, and the 10 minutes it took to arrive at the scene “seemed like a lifetime.”
Fauquier emergency services coordinator Chuck Thompson heard the calls and felt a chill. (Thompson supplied the times of all the calls). He too raced to the scene, barely beating Sanders there.
Lt. Shrock took his men to help pull Amtrak passengers out of the wrecked train.
Jay McDevitt had already gone down the track to extract passengers. “People were coming out like ants,” he said.
Arthur Digges arrived within a few minutes of leaving his auto parts store and found Catlett chief Lomax. “Clyde and I and William Armstrong went up the track a couple of hundred yards looking for the front of the truck.”
They were looking along the Route 28 side of the tracks. Digges did not hear sounds from the train, but he paid little attention. “I knew everybody on the fire truck. I was looking for the cab. We went up the track and we went back. Clyde said, ‘I just can’t go anymore.’ He was so close to the fellows and he just couldn’t take it anymore. It was more than he could stand.”
Annette Craun, 24, a rescue lieutenant with Cedar Run, was among the first on the scene, as were Donald Mason, Melvin Jones, and Dottie Williams.
Digges says that he borrowed a flashlight from Armstrong and crossed through the train to search the other side. “When I saw them I hollered for help. I came back through the train and hollered for help.”
A state police officer heard him, Digges said, and led other people through the train.
Lt. Craun said that “when I got to the scene Chief Lomax came up to me and said ‘Annette I can’t find my truck, and I can’t find my boys.” She pulled herself up the incline by grabbing onto the brush.
She found the bodies and the three injured firefighters.
“I grew up with these boys,” Lt.
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