Cracked, uneven platform contributed to woman falling, being hit by train: leaked report
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
Six days before Christmas in 2022, a woman stepped off the last GO train of the night at Scarborough’s Eglinton Station.
The platform was cracked, uneven, riddled with holes, and slightly angled toward the tracks. The woman lost her balance and fell partially under the train as it was leaving the station.
She lay on the tracks for more than four hours in freezing weather, alive but seriously injured, before a construction worker found her around 5:30 a.m.
Paramedics rushed the woman to the hospital, where she died at 7:10 a.m.
Metrolinx and Toronto police released few details, and the death was reported in simple terms — person struck by train, pronounced deceased, expect delays. Police told media there was no negligence on the part of GO Transit.
However, a draft of Metrolinx’s internal accident investigation, obtained by The Trillium, reveals more, including that the transit agency was warned multiple times about unsafe conditions on the platform the woman fell from, months before she died.
Metrolinx engineering advisors recommended in July 2022 that the agency replace Eglinton Station’s “deteriorated” platform curbs, highlighting the risk to passengers disembarking trains.
The uneven surface “poses [a] fall hazard by creating a non-standard vertical distance for passengers stepping off/on at train doors,” reads Metrolinx’s summary of the report written by 4Transit, a group made up of engineering firms Hatch, Parsons, and WSP.
“Full rework of the platform and the curbs is recommended to eliminate such risk.”
Metrolinx wrote that it planned to do so, but not until July 2023, more than seven months after the woman fell and died, according to the draft investigation.
Investigation photos showing the chipped, sloped platform and construction fencing encroaching on the walkway. Metrolinx
Investigators found that the platform was sloped toward the tracks at between four and five per cent, while Metrolinx requires slopes not to exceed two per cent, according to the draft report. Metrolinx
Metrolinx’s timeline of events. Metrolinx
Two months before the engineers’ report, Metrolinx did its own risk assessment in response to “a number of safety concerns” about the station, which was undergoing construction at the time, according to the agency’s draft report.
One concern had to do with construction fencing, which narrowed the walkway on the platform where the woman fell.
That June, a construction contractor moved the fences to widen the space back to the agency’s required minimum distance of 1.8 metres. The day after the passenger died, Metrolinx investigators found the fencing had returned, narrowing the walkway again to 1.2 metres.
Metrolinx investigators also found the platform’s walking surface hadn’t changed since the engineers’ report — it was “uneven, contains cracks, holes, and ponding water” and was sloped at more than twice the recommended limit toward the tracks.
Metrolinx’s draft report called the woman’s death an “isolated incident” in which she lost her balance “under ambiguous circumstances.”
It noted just one contributing factor: “platform uneven surface.”
The draft report warned that if safety recommendations aren’t followed, “it may lead to hazard risks remaining unmitigated, resulting in risk of injury or death to passengers.”
While the agency also highlighted the danger of frozen puddles forming on the bumpy platform, it found that the ground was dry that night.
In its list of corrective actions, Metrolinx wrote that it installed caution signs on both platforms, and that it planned to fix the platforms by Oct. 16, 2023 (this was completed in 2024).
It also pledged to develop a process for monitoring the station after service hours to make sure nobody would go unseen for hours again, and to make sure CCTV cameras have unobstructed views, as they were partially blocked by vegetation on the night of the woman’s death.
Signage installed after the woman’s death, warning of the platform’s uneven surface. Metrolinx
A screenshot from a CCTV camera at the station, partially obscured by foliage. Metrolinx
Metrolinx would not answer specific questions about its internal investigation, including whether it addressed any safety concerns raised before the passenger’s death, without seeing the report itself. The Trillium did not share a copy with the agency to protect the source who provided it.
Metrolinx and Ontario Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria’s office stressed the agency’s safety record and said their thoughts remained with the victim’s family and the first responders affected by the death.
“The Ministry of Transportation continues to take action and make record investments to support safety performance, operations, identify improvements, and strengthen safeguards in place to ensure the highest standards of safety are maintained across the network,” Sarkaria spokesperson Charlotte Carron said in a statement.
Improvements include “monitoring technologies, dedicated transit safety personnel, community education programs, and infrastructure measures such as anti-trespass barriers, fencing, and grade separations designed to reduce risks and prevent incidents,” Metrolinx spokesperson Lyndsay Miller said in a separate statement.
The investigation doesn’t provide details on the passenger’s identity or her injuries, beyond the fact that they were “serious.” By the time she was transported to the hospital, police described her injuries as “life-threatening.” In response to a Trillium request on Friday, Toronto police said the victim was an adult woman, but declined to share more details as it was “not a criminal incident.”
The GO train crew itself was unaware that a passenger was hit by the train, according to the draft report.
For most serious safety incidents on its tracks, Metrolinx only investigates itself, as The Trillium revealed last week.
Metrolinx voluntarily reported the woman’s death to the federal Transportation Safety Board, but it did not investigate. The TSB said it classified the incident as “class five,” meaning it “has little likelihood of identifying new safety lessons that will advance transportation safety.”
NDP transit critic Tom Rakocevic said the incident underscores the need for a public inquiry into Metrolinx, an idea Premier Doug Ford has ruled out.
“Metrolinx often operates under a veil of secrecy, and the government’s letting them get away with it,” Rakocevic said. “These are the things we know about. We don’t know what else is out there.”
