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deputy Butler Grant and rescue worker Mary' Kay Anderson serv ed as public iformation officers.
Fires started under the locomotive, w'here 2,600 gallons of diesel fuel spilled. Fred Mungo, the conductor, told Thompson the dining car stoves might be run on propane tanks, and Thompson feared an explosion. Then a fire started in the dining car. Both fires were put out quickly.
The blazing array of lights flooded the wreck and the pastures around it, turning night to clay. Before long the line of fire trucks, ambulances and police vehicles lined Route 28 for a mile.
Hundreds of rescue workers — Butler Grant estimates 250 — swarmed about their duties.
Route 28 was blocked in both directions. Yellow police tape was strapped at the road, at the train tracks, the command center Thompson set up across from the jackknifed cars, across a pasture where the injured were tended to.
Helicopters dropped thudding out of the dark into the next field. Rescue workers tore down part of a fence between the fields and carried the injured, some strappd to stetchers, to the helicopters which flew them to area hospitals, including Fairfax, Prince William, Fauquier. Ambulances carried more.
Thompson had heavy Army helicopters standing by, “but we didn’t need them, thank God.”
Fauquier County school buses shuttled the passengers to nearby H. M. Pearson Elementary School. Southern Railway cranes arrived, ready to right the cars.
Amtrak detoured train traffic and brought in charter buses to take passengers from Pearson Elementary to Washington, to area hotels, and to a few destination points south.
Marylander Charles Watts asked a state trooper, “Is there a place here to rent a car?” The cop gave him a look. “How about a taxi?”
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