An eastbound Long Island Rail Road train struck and killed two young women just west of the Copiague station, officials said.
The women were not authorized to be on the elevated tracks, which are on an embankment, said a LIRR spokesman. They were hit by the 5:19 p.m. train out of Penn Station, he said, but there were no passengers on it at the time.
A second assistant chief for the Copiague Fire department described the victims as "two young girls in their late teens, early twenties."
The 12-car train had finished its run at Wantagh and was heading toward Babylon when the accident happened. t's not clear what barriers, if any, were in place to prevent people from going up the embankment. The place where the train struck the women was on an elevated track a couple hundred feet west of the station platform and not near any pedestrian crossings.
Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) police are investigating and trying to find out the identities of the women.
Both the Suffolk County Medical Examiner and the Copiague Fire Department were at the scene.
