Straphangers on a Lower Manhattan subway platform jumped into action Saturday morning to pull a man who wound up on the tracks to safety after they stopped an incoming train, cops and a witness said.
“It was sort of crazy. It felt a little intense at the moment, but everyone sort of came together and saved the day, I guess,” said Jack Shanley, who was waiting for the Uptown No. 1 train at the World Trade Center station around 11:30 a.m. when he spotted the 65-year-old man on the tracks and called 911.
The man had gotten stuck with his foot “wedged between the rail and the ground,” Shanley, 27, said.
“He wasn’t really making any noise or anything,” he recalled. “It didn’t even seem like he was really aware that he had fallen on the tracks.”
It wasn’t immediately clear how the man ended up on the tracks, cops said.
As an incoming train rumbled toward the station, a group of roughly five straphangers standing at the mouth of the station motioned to the train operator to stop, Shanley said. The train halted about 50 to 60 feet from the man.
“Once we saw that the train had stopped,” Shanley said, “two people went down into the tracks to help him get himself unstuck, and then others had to lift him up out of there because he couldn’t climb out of there.”
Shanley said the man didn’t thank anyone, and seemed to have “no idea what was going on.”
“Someone asked him to sit down, and he just said, ‘Where do you want me to sit down?’” Shanley said. “One of the other people who had been talking to him a little bit more, trying to get information from him, said that he said he couldn’t see. I think they asked him how he fell or if he jumped, and he said that he just couldn’t see what was going on.”
Shanley, who was headed home to the Upper West Side when the chaotic scene unfolded, said it was nice to see fellow New Yorkers band together in crisis.
“It was good to see people… No one was panicking or freaking out; it was kind of very down to business,” he said. “People got together and did what they had to do, which is nice.”
