On a typical late-summer night 20 years ago, thousands of Toronto residents began their evening commute in the dark underbelly of the city.

Many didn’t make it home.

A two-train subway crash on the Spadina line — the worst accident in the TTC’s history — left three dead, 30 hospitalized, and dozens more injured.

For most Toronto residents, the events of Aug. 11, 1995, are long forgotten. But for those who experienced the tragedy first-hand, the memories still run deep.

The train on the receiving end of the crash was stopped at a signal light on the southbound Spadina line, just north of Dupont. The second train, thanks to a combination of mechanical and human errors, kept going — smashing into the first at a speed of nearly 50 km/h, leading to a twisted wreckage of metal filling the entire circumference of the tunnel.

Some say it looked like a scene from a war movie.

From within the tunnel’s stifling heat and near-darkness, dozens of passengers escaped into the summer air above, while others remained trapped in the contorted skeletons of the train cars, pinned under seats and against the aluminum frame, amid broken glass and debris.

Christina Munar Reyes, 33, Kinga Szabo, 43, and Xian Hui Lin, 23, lost their lives in the crash.

The driver of the second train, Robert Jeffrey, survived. He’d only been on the job two days when he ran three sets of red lights before rounding a curve under Russell Hill Dr. shortly after 6 p.m., only to realize a train was stopped ahead.

Coupled with this driver error, a design flaw with the Ericsson trip arm, a safety device meant to engage the brakes of trains passing through stop signals, contributed to the crash.

The tragedy led to sweeping changes throughout the transit system. An internal TTC investigation and coroner’s inquest resulted in 236 recommendations, all of which have since been closed out, according to the TTC’s chief safety officer, John O’Grady.

Within the TTC, there was a culture shift, O’Grady says.

“I think if you could characterize it, when we built the subway in the early ’50s it was beautiful, it was state-of-the-art, modern, new, nothing was worn out,” he says.

“We got used to the TTC being one of the top subways in the world. By the time Russell Hill came along 25 years later … it was kind of a wakeup call for us, for that culture of concern (about) the state of good repair.”

Many TTC staff were on scene that night — along with paramedics, police officers, firefighters, physicians and passersby.

More than 280 rescuers poured into the subway tunnel and manned command posts on the surface, assisting more than 200 passengers escape the two mangled trains. The last survivors weren’t removed until after 2 a.m.

Michael Killingsworth, a staff sergeant with the TTC’s transit enforcement unit, has attended dozens of subway suicides and homicides in his nearly 30-year career. Even so, Aug. 11, 1995, is “the worst night I’ve ever had,” he says.

Retired firefighter Ken Bodrug, one of the first responders that evening, calls it a “horrible experience,” but one he wouldn’t want to forget.

“For the sake of the souls that never came out of there that night, I believe that all of us left a little part of ourselves down there,” he told the Star. “Forgetting it just makes the memory of those people meaningless.”

Twenty years after that night, some of those on scene offered to share their memories of the horror — and heroism — of the Russell Hill crash.

The passenger

It was 5 p.m., and Janette Tansley was eager to head downtown and buy some new clothes — a relaxing Friday night after a long week at her new temp job at a construction materials company in North York.

After hopping on a southbound subway car at Wilson Station, 31-year-old Tansley became lost in a David Pogue novel until a sudden, violent bang sent her glasses and book flying.

“I thought, maybe, they’d jammed on the brakes really hard,” she recalls.

Tansley and her fellow passengers sat calmly until smoke began seeping from the cars behind, followed by soot-covered passengers.

After a TTC staff member opened the doors, Tansley followed the tracks to safety, unaware until later that her train had been rear-ended — and that she was one of the lucky ones.

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The TTC staff

Transit investigators Michael Killingsworth and Tom Farrell were on plainclothes duty in the west end when they got a call about Dupont station shortly after 6 p.m.

The two young TTC transit enforcement staff — Killingsworth was 31, Farrell just 27 — heard whimpering and crying as they walked north up the subway tunnel. Arriving at the mangled trains, Killingsworth stayed in the rear-ended south train while Farrell headed farther north.

It was like a sauna, Farrell recalls. He spotted a woman protruding from the wreckage, and another woman — already dead — crushed in the debris. To this day, he can picture the face of a young boy trapped under a seat with his mother.

“I said: ‘Everything’s gonna be alright, we’re going to get you out of here,’” Farrell recalls. “I had a 2-year-old at home. When you’re in a situation like that, you connect parallels to your life.”

The firefighter

Ken Bodrug was one of the first emergency responders to arrive at Dupont station — where no one, not even a ticket collector or supervisor, seemed to know what was going on — and headed north along the tracks, while passengers like Tansley began escaping the crumpled train cars ahead.

“They were all just walking like zombies through this haze of smoke,” Bodrug says.

It was the 44-year-old’s first time being an acting captain for Pumper 23, and his mind was racing.

Clad in his bunker suit, rubber boots and suspenders in the sweltering heat, Bodrug remembers the first person he helped that night: A man sitting beside his dead wife. His legs were pinned amid the wreckage and later had to be amputated to free him. It was Roberto Reyes, and he didn’t yet know his wife, Christina, had passed away.

“That was the worst part for me,” Bodrug says, softly.

The paramedic

Once paramedics and other emergency responders began flowing in and out of the tunnel, 41-year-old Peter Rotolo acted as a command officer, co-ordinating his team’s efforts from a command post outside.

From the command post, near the Russell Hill emergency exit in Winston Churchill Park, Rotolo could see passengers surfacing from the crash site — some with lacerations, others having difficulty breathing, and many coping with physical and emotional exhaustion.

Rotolo recalls one child who’d been trapped in the front car with some of the passengers who died.

“You always wonder: How did that child react? How are they feeling today?” Rotolo says. “Those are the things you wonder about: How did everybody else carry on?”

The physician

Dr. Andrew McCallum was used to the safe, well-lit atmosphere of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, where he was the 39-year-old director of emergency services.

But that night, he worked amid chaos. “I likened it to two huge aluminum cans being crushed into each other,” he says.

Firefighters and paramedics inside a train car were struggling to free a woman — Xian Ho Lin — who was trapped below the waist and surrounded by debris. Using surgical instruments and tools from the station site, McCallum amputated Lin’s leg. She later died.

“I felt terribly that we couldn’t save her. There wasn’t any kind of sense in accomplishment in that,” McCallum recalls. “But I was glad that I was able to help.”

The police officer

“You could hear it. You could smell it.”

Sgt. Ed Lamch was nearby when Dr. McCallum used a saw to amputate Lin’s leg. The 47-year-old told his fellow Toronto police officers to go, if needed. “I said, ‘If you can’t take this, please, I won’t think ill of you — you can leave,’” he recalls.

Throughout the night, Lamch traveled back and forth between the two trains by crawling along the tracks underneath the carriages.

At one point, he witnessed a trapped mother and child — and outside, in the safety above, he saw them one more time. “I think the child was 4 or 5 years old at the time,” Lamch recalls. “As he walked past us, he looked at us and waved — and we waved back.”

Lamch doesn’t know the names of all the passengers and emergency responders he encountered that night, but the memories — those are burned into his brain.

“As much as time is supposed to heal, it’s still there,” he says.