Incoming train kills 57 years old railway worker on duty in Manhattan, United States of America

An on-duty MTA track worker died in a mishap with a subway train in Midtown overnight just one month shy of his one-year anniversary with the agency.

Hilarion Joseph, 57, was part of a cleaning crew just south of the 34 St-Herald Square station just before 12:15 a.m.

That is when he came into contact and was dragged by a slow-moving northbound D train. The train was going about 10 mph during the scheduled maintenance.

Joseph was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The victim was a flagger on the track work crew collecting trash from the tracks. As a flagger, he was responsible for alerting oncoming trains to track work further down the line.

“Whether there was not enough clearance, whether he stumbled, we don’t know, but obviously, a flagger should under any circumstance, shouldn’t be coming into contact with the train,” said NYC Transit President Rich Davey.

MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber said the incident remains under investigation to determine what went wrong.

“Our folks were at the hospital last night, with the worker’s family, obviously they are very much in our thoughts right now, it’s a difficult morning, most of all, for those of us close to our colleague,” Lieber said.

Scheduled transit work, except for emergency work, has been suspended for the next 24 hours.

“We are taking the opportunity to refresh and retrain our employees on protocols when it comes to track safety, its been mentioned by a few folks that these are dangerous jobs that we ask are people to do day in and day out, that includes folks working on the tracks,” Davey said.

The last time an MTA worker died on the job was in 2020 while evacuating a burning drain during an arson fire. In 2018, a track worker was killed after he fell and his his head while cleaning up debris.

“We have an inherent risk in the job because we are on the tracks doing work on the live train traffic, it doesn’t get more dangerous than that,” said TWU Safety Director John Chiarello.

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