Amtrak

RENO, Nev. -- Lawsuits continue to pile up against the Battle Mountain company that owns the truck that slammed into an Amtrak passenger train in northern Nevada in June, killing five and injuring 20.

BRENTWOOD, Calif. -- Dozens of people were injured Friday evening when an Amtrak passenger train collided with a farm truck at a rural crossing east of the city, an Amtrak spokeswoman said.

MIAMI -- As a Greyhound bus prepared to leave a small town near Atlanta, 19-year-old Azucena headed to the window seat on the last row, on her way to Miami to start school and a new life.

She propped a pillow against the glass and drifted off to sleep as the bus glided down the highway toward South Florida.

Around 5 a.m., Azucena, who does not want her last name used, woke up when the bus driver pulled up to the Pompano Beach bus station -- one stop before her final destination.

Three U.S. Border Patrol agents boarded, announcing they would be checking IDs. She lifted her head to see one agent walking directly toward her.

"It kind of looked like they already knew who they were looking for, because they went straight to the back where I was," said Azucena, now enrolled in a beauty school in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood.

At that moment, one frightening thought raced through her mind: "Oh my God I'm being deported!"

Azucena spent the next 76 days in a federal immigration center, Broward Transitional Center, becoming one of a fast-growing number of undocumented immigrants caught in what may be the latest crackdown: grabbing them from public transportation, mainly Greyhound and Amtrak.

Immigration searches on public transportation sites are not well publicized. Border patrol agents generally protect the border or coastline. But, Steve Cribby, spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, says agents have the authority to conduct immigration checks in public places. And checks on Greyhound buses and Amtrak are meant to disrupt human smuggling activities into the country's interior, he said.

RENO, Nev. -- Robert Hill's mind keeps returning to one image from the smoke-filled Amtrak passenger car: the elderly woman he tried, again and again, to coax down from the upper deck after he escaped the burning train.

"I was telling her to jump out the window, but she never did, and she went out of sight," said Hill, a professor from Taylorsville, Miss., who survived the horrific collision between a tractor-trailer and an Amtrak train in Nevada's high desert. "I remember her frail arms hanging out the window. I'll never know whether she made it out alive or not."

About 200 passengers fled from the train -- some, like, Hill, by jumping through windows -- to avoid a tower of fire sparked when a big rig plowed into a double-decker car at a rural highway crossing about 70 miles east of Reno on Friday.

OAKLAND, Calif. — A Davis County man who survived a deadly Amtrak train/semitrailer collision outside Reno, Nev., on Friday says he might have been a “goner” had he been sitting a few cars closer to the front of the passenger train.

SPARKS, Nev. — Investigators struggled Monday to piece together how a truck driver who plowed into an Amtrak train in the Nevada desert failed to notice the crossing gates and blinking lights that should have been visible a half-mile away.

At least six people were killed and five people are unaccounted for after the fiery crash that gutted two rail cars and left the semi-truck buried inside one. On Monday, the Nevada Highway Patrol identified the trucker as Lawrence R. Valli, 43, of Winnemuca.

Reversing a near 10-year ban, Amtrak will allow passengers to bring guns on most trains starting Dec. 15.