The first thing that 20-year-old dance student Emma Shafer noticed as she was jolted awake was the smell of burning rubber and steel. For the next 30 seconds, she felt as if she were in a shoebox that someone was shaking around.

Shafer, a freshman at Cornish College of Arts in Seattle, was in car 7 of Amtrak 501 on her way home for her first long break since she started school in August. She had grown up in Portland and Vancouver.

She was excited about the trip and Snapchatted about it with her friends.

"Let's go America trains! Show me what you've got!" one of the messages said, with a photo of the Seattle platform in the background. She had been on train rides in Germany before, she said, but never in the U.S.

The ride was also a first for Amtrak -- the inaugural passenger run along a freshly built line from Seattle to Portland. The much-anticipated $181 million project was going to reduce travel time between the cities, allowing for more trips each day.

After an 11-minute delay that an announcement attributed to mechanical issues, the train took off at 6:11 a.m Monday, Shafer said. She went to the dining car and got a banana and a bagel. Back at her seat, she read a little of Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles." Then she put the book down, lay across two seats and fell asleep.

The next moment she was awake, she was at the whim of gravity, nature and chaos. The lights were flickering. A screeching sound broke the air. She described it as "too-big-to fail-metal that is failing." A man behind her started yelling that his legs were pinned.

"It was just pure panic and pure, like, 'Oh my God, what's going on, I have to hang on to something.'"

She estimated the train shook about 30 seconds. She tried to brace herself between her seat and the seat in front of her.

The train had derailed, hurtling off an overpass and onto the southbound lanes of Interstate 5 below. Her car hung down at an angle, the bottom end resting on an upside-down railcar.

Three people died in the crash, officials said, and more than 70 were hospitalized. The train was going 80 mph in a 30 mph zone, investigators said, though they haven't determined the cause of the crash yet.

The car went dark and most of the windows cracked but stayed intact. A piece of metal went through one of the windows, sending some glass into the car and landing in Shafer's shoes.

There were just a handful of people in Shafer's car, around eight, she estimated. A woman and her baby were stuck in the car's restroom. Except for the man with the pinned legs, nobody seemed injured, she said. Minus a sore elbow, Shafer was fine.

She started to look for her things. Another passenger found her phone. Shafer found that passenger's shoes. The man with the pinned legs stopped yelling.

Within five minutes, rescuers arrived, she said.

A man said, "Hi, I'm Robert. I'm going to get you guys out of here."

The man gave the passengers instructions on how to get out. Shafer had to climb over seats and a table to get around debris in the aisle. She stepped out one of the car's doors onto the upside-down train car that her car had fallen on.

"I stood on top of this train car and surveyed the insane wreckage," Shafer said. "It was kind of a lot to process."

Part of a train car chassis was under the overpass. A man was leaning into the driver's side of an SUV smashed against a guard rail. A man in a military uniform walked past the smashed SUV, looking toward Shafer.

Someone led Shafer to the shoulder of the interstate. She got a tag with detachable strips that showed emergency workers who needed care and how fast.

The first strip was green, with a picture of an ambulance with an X through it. The next one was yellow and had a turtle. The third one was red and showed a hare. The fourth one was black with a cross.

Shafer was left all with all strips attached, meaning she didn't need urgent care.

She called her mother and almost immediately broke into tears, Shafer said.

"I was like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm OK. I'm really lucky. I'm just really shaken up,'" Shafer said.

Her father called her. Her best friend called her.

Shafer said she saw emergency crews taking away the injured. Many people were in neck braces. Some had slings around their arms. One man had a bandaged leg.

Eventually a bus took Shafer to City Hall in nearby DuPont, between Tacoma and Olympia. Just to get her mind off things, she said she practiced ballet there for about 10 minutes.

"I just needed to move," she said.

Several hours later, she got bused to Portland with about 10 other people. A friend picked her up at Union Station and drove her home to her mom in La Center, Wash., just north of Vancouver. The two hugged.

"It felt like I'd been carrying all this emotion and stress," Shafer said. "And I could finally collapse in and relax."

Were you on this train? Do you know somebody who was? If so, please call reporter Fedor Zarkhin at 503-294-7674 or email him at fzarkhin@oregonian.com.

Reporter Molly Young contributed to this report.

-- Fedor Zarkhin

503-294-7674; @fedorzarkhin