Photos Show Woman Nearly Crushed by Subway

An eagle-eyed motorman saved a straphanger from almost certain death when he slammed the brakes on a 370-ton train – missing by mere seconds a woman who had fallen on the tracks.

Stunning photographs show the unidentified woman sprawled out on the subway tracks at the Fifth Ave. and 59th St. station about 7 a.m. Saturday.

“The train was rolling into the station and I heard this scream,” said Raymond Rosario, a doorman who was on his way home to Queens. “She was moaning. She couldn’t get up.”

Witnesses along the N train platform waved their arms frantically and screamed for the motorman to stop as the woman lay twisted and helpless. Her body was partially in the drainage trough between the tracks. A black satchel still hung over her left shoulder.

“It seemed like it wasn’t going to stop,” Rosario told the Daily News. “It came so so close, I never saw anything like that. She was very lucky.”

Motorman Francis Lusk had spotted the woman as she plummeted onto the tracks about 300 feet in front of his speeding train.

“She walked right off the platform,” Lusk, 36, told the Daily News. “I was shocked. I didn’t know what was wrong.”

Lusk, the grandson of a motorman, didn’t hesitate.

As spectators looked on in disbelief, he immediately hit the brakes and blew his horn to deter straphangers from jumping onto the electrified train bed.

The train came to a halt about 70 feet from the woman’s body, Lusk said.

The motorman called the radio control center to have the power turned off, hopped out of his train and raced to help the woman.

“I was just going on instinct,” said Lusk. “If she was discombobulated, she might not have known where she was and stumbled onto the third rail.”

Lusk knelt on the tracks and consoled the woman, but didn’t move her because he feared he might exacerbate her injuries. Blood dripped from the woman’s face. She was dazed but conscious.

“Ma’am, just relax. Don’t move,” Lusk told the woman, who appeared to be in her early 30s. “We have police and paramedics on the way.”

The woman told Lusk she was feeling dizzy. He handed her tissues, and she blotted the blood running from a cut above her left eye.

In less than five minutes, cops and firefighters appeared on the platform. They hopped onto the railbed, secured the woman on a stretcher and hauled her out of the station, Lusk said.

The mystery woman was taken to New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Meanwhile, Lusk finished his shift and headed to his Valley Stream, L.I., home about 1 p.m.

“I was just doing my job,” said the humble motorman, who joined the MTA two years ago.

N train service was suspended from 7:16 a.m. to 7:57 a.m.

“Thanks to the quick thinking and actions of one of our employees this incident – which could have had very tragic consequences – instead had a very happy ending,” said Tom Prendergast, president of NYC Transit.

The bespectacled saint in MTA clothing joins a growing list of subway heroes.

Wesley Autrey leaped onto the tracks in 2007 and saved Cameron Hollopeter, a stranger who apparently had a seizure and fell from a Harlem platform.

In May, a still-unidentified good Samaritan jumped to the tracks and saved 26-year-old Jessica Oshita from being crushed by an L train in the Union Square station after she fainted and tumbled off the platform.