Bart Accident,11 Injured

BART trains are running on time following a crash earlier today involving two trains beneath downtown Oakland - but the crash site has not yet been cleared.

The trains were heading toward the 12th Street/Oakland City Center station when one sideswiped another about 2:55 p.m. in the Oakland Wye, a junction beneath downtown, said Linton Johnson, a BART spokesman. He described it as a minor incident.

One of the trains had departed West Oakland station; the other was coming from Lake Merritt station.

The accident happened about 3 p.m. Johnson said one of the trains was traveling from the West Oakland station to Pittsburg/Bay Point and one was coming from the Lake Merritt station to Richmond.

They were traveling in the same direction, so the collision was a side-to-side collision, not a head-on crash, he said. Johnson said one of the trains was being operated manually and one was being operated automatically by a computer.

"We'll have to look into what happened," he said.

One of the trains went off the rail, he said. Passengers managed to exit the trains and used a catwalk to return to the platform.

Rescue and fire crews are working to dislodge the trains.

Johnson said he hopes full service on the Richmond line will be restored by the morning commute.

Eleven people suffered what appeared to be minor injuries when two BART trains collided at the 12th Street station in Oakland this afternoon, said Capt. Joseph Torres of the Oakland Fire Department.

Injured commuters were being taken on stretchers up escalators and elevators to ambulances waiting on Broadway.

The front cars on both trains were knocked off the rails, and will need to be placed back on the tracks before they can be moved.

BART officials said they expect to move the trains in the morning.

The cause of the accident is under investigation. BART trains normally operate under an automatic control system that makes it virtually impossible for a collision to occur, Johnson said. But one of the trains in the collision was being operated manually.