In the first confusing minutes after an airliner struck the World Trade Center, a different drama began to unfold underground.
PATH commuter trains from New Jersey were arriving every three minutes at the station below, their dispatchers, crews and passengers blind to the destruction above.
But before the second plane hit on Sept. 11, 2001 — just 17 minutes after the first — all train service was suspended into and out of the trade center. One train would pull into the station and turn around without unloading passengers; another would re-board after having just dropped passengers off. A third would arrive empty to pick up stragglers.
A series of critical decisions made with scant information likely saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. On a day of tragedy when nearly 3,000 people did lose their lives, it was a shining hour for PATH employees, tempered by the deaths of 85 of their colleagues at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
“I don’t look at it from the viewpoint that I saved those people,” said retired trainmaster Richie Moran, who gave the order to stop the trains. “You know how I look at it? That I didn’t kill those people. I think I just did my job very well that day.”
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