NTSB releases details, documents on fatal Valhalla crash The Feb. 3 crash killed five people on the train along with SUV driver Ellen Brody.

Federal safety investigators offered up in chilling detail Wednesday a grim account of the scene in Valhalla where a Metro-North train slammed into an SUV that mistakenly crossed its path, killing six people.

The flood of documents, including detailed graphic passenger accounts of what occurred inside the burning rail car, raise questions about the railroad crossing, such as the timing of the nearby traffic light. They also offered up hints about the direction of the NTSB investigation, including a close examination into the actions of Ellen Brody, a mother of three from Edgemont, at the wheels of a Mercedes SUV she had purchased just months before.

What the 1,000 plus pages of documents released by the National Transportation Safety Board doesn't provide is a conclusion about the February crash, the deadliest in the commuter rail’s 33-year history. A final report is months away, federal officials say.

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Among the documents is a section where NTSB investigators said that at the time of the crash, the traffic lights at the intersection of Commerce Street and Taconic State Parkway violated federal standards that require trains to take precedence over vehicular traffic.That infraction would be corrected, according to the documents.

As a train approaches the railroad crossing, the traffic lights at the intersection should have been programmed to always allow eastbound vehicles nearest the grade crossing to clear the area first regardless of what other traffic exists. The needs of the approaching train should be prioritized before anything else, according to federal standards.

Instead, the NTSB found if westbound Commerce Street traffic was congested and in danger of backing up onto the parkway and grade crossing just as the train approached, all traffic lights turned red. That allowed westbound traffic to clear but halted eastbound traffic.

Federal investigators did not say whether the violations played a role in the Metro-North crash. Brody’s vehicle was traveling east at the time of the crash. NTSB said the New York state Department of Transportation was reviewing its signals and make adjustments where necessary.

Gary Holmes, a spokesman for DOT, said officials would await the release of NTSB’s final report before making “further enhancements.”

“The NTSB has said the grade crossing functioned as designed,” he said. “Further enhancements at this crossing and others are possible based on NTSB recommendations following the release of the final report.”

Among other new findings released:

Firefighters originally responded to Cleveland Avenue, believing the train crash occurred there but after finding no activity, redirected themselves to the Commerce Street crossing

Fire crews might have inadvertently helped spread the fire by pointing a high-capacity water hose directly onto the train. Crews believed that the water stream would cool down the railcar and help put out the fire, but it instead pushed the fire further through the car, according to an unnamed MTA investigator. “It kind of advanced the fire probably a little bit more quickly than it would if nothing was done at that point in time,” he said.

Tests found no alcohol or illicit drugs in Brody’s system.

Brody was not using her cell phone at the time of the 6:26 p.m. crash. She had received a phone call from her husband, Alan, at 6:11 p.m., when they reportedly spoke about directions and bills for just under 9 minutes.

Ellen Brody did not have experience negotiating grade crossings

During an April interview, investigators asked Alan Brody how familiar his wife was with the electronic shift selector on her 2011 Mercedes Benz ML 350 SUV. The couple had purchased the car two months earlier and were wondering if it could it have delayed her from moving the SUV from the crossing.

“It’s a very simple car to operate,” Brody said. “You want to go forward, you push the gear down; you want to go backwards you push the gear up.”

Brody said his wife liked the vehicle and never had trouble getting used to the setup. Her main complaint might have been that there was no place to put her purse.

“She drives responsibly…,” he said. “And she’s just very cautious and take it – you know it’s not the way I drive.”

But Alan Brody told investigators his wife had no experience with grade crossings.

“None?” an investigator asked.

“There’s no rail crossings where we live; it’s all bridges,” Brody noted.

He said his wife was in good spirits the day of the crash and anxious to meet a new client for her bookkeeping business.

“They were friendly,” he said. “She was looking forward to making a new friend. And so she was in good spirits as you’d expect.”

Instead of using a GPS for directions Ellen Brody regularly checked with her husband as she had in the minutes before the crash when he told her to take the Bronx River Parkway to Exit 12, which would get her to Scarsdale and the meeting with a client.

By 6:20 p.m. – some six minutes before the crash – one of their phones died. Brody did not know if it was his phone or his wife’s phone that died.

Brody guessed his wife was likely diverted off the Bronx River Parkway while trying to go southbound from Chappaqua where she had a part-time job at a jewelry store.

“How she ended up going southbound to basically heading northeast is a mystery that I cannot explain to you, other than we do know there was an accident prior that she was directed off the highway,” Brody said. “That’s the best that we know.”

The exchange grew testy after investigators asked Brody to speculate on why the accident might have occurred.

“I just don’t really know what the purpose of that is,” Brody’s attorney, Richard Oleson, said.

Kenneth Bragg, a human performance investigator for the NTSB, persisted, suggesting only Brody could offer insight into his wife’s thinking.

“Well, the reason I was going to ask him to speculate, because he knows his wife better than anybody in this room,” Bragg said.

Brody said his wife, unlike him, hadn’t grown up around trains and might have been disoriented by the signage in the area.

“You know what I think?” Brody said. “I don’t think any of those signs make any sense to anybody who who doesn’t have my background or doesn’t live in the neighborhood. Somebody who just came out of the blue – she had no idea that there was a railroad crossing there…There was snow everywhere. Obviously she didn’t know she was sitting on a railroad crossing. I mean, even the idiot behind her, it didn’t seem to dawn on him that she wasn’t aware that she was on a railroad crossing. So you want my opinion, there’s my opinion.”

“Al, Al, just calm down,” his attorney told him after he told investigators they’d never done “perception research” on the signs.