A car slammed into a Pittsburgh Regional Transit light rail vehicle Thursday afternoon in Mt. Lebanon, sending two people to the hospital with a knee injury and a head injury. The crash happened where the Red Line crosses Poplar Drive, with roughly 20 passengers aboard the train at the time.
What Happened at the Crossing
According to WTAE, the car struck the light rail vehicle near the Poplar Drive crossing Thursday afternoon, and officials initially had not said whether the two people hospitalized were riding the train or driving the car. That detail has since come into focus: a PRT spokesperson told Cedar News that the crash left a light rail passenger with a knee injury and the vehicle's driver with a head injury, and both were taken to a Pittsburgh hospital. The condition of the injured was not immediately known, per the station's report, and WTAE noted that Sky 4 was over the scene as crews worked the collision.
The light rail vehicle began moving again once the scene was cleared, the station's report added. Poplar station sits at street level at Pennsylvania Boulevard and Poplar Drive, a crossing described by Wikipedia as running through a densely populated residential stretch of Mt. Lebanon that mostly serves local commuters.
A Crossing Already Flagged for Upgrades
Poplar station was among ten light rail stops slated for accessible platform construction after the Federal Transit Administration awarded Pittsburgh Regional Transit $8 million for the work in May 2024, according to the same Wikipedia entry. The stop sits along a corridor PRT has been actively working on: during the summer of 2024, the agency completed track and pavement replacements along nearby Alfred Street in Mt. Lebanon as part of a broader rehabilitation push, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported at the time.
That work is part of a larger, multi-year effort. PRT launched a $150 million infrastructure rehabilitation program in March 2024 aimed at replacing aging tracks, grade crossings and tunnels across the Red Line and the wider system through 2028, WPXI reported. More recently, in July 2026, PRT temporarily closed a stretch of the Red Line between Alabama and Hillsdale avenues in neighboring Dormont to replace rail crossings there, running shuttle buses while the work was underway, per WPXI.
A System Carrying Thousands Daily
PRT's light rail network, known locally as The T, spans more than 26 miles and 53 stations across the Red, Blue and Silver lines, carrying an average of about 27,000 riders a day. Street-level crossings like the one at Poplar Drive aren't new flashpoints for collisions between trains and vehicles — Wikipedia's record of incidents on the system lists a 2017 crash involving a pickup truck in Dormont and a 2014 vehicle collision in Castle Shannon, both along the same Red Line corridor.
The agency has also been pushing routine maintenance elsewhere on the line. In January 2026, PRT kicked off its annual $1.5 million rail grinding initiative between Overbrook Junction and Allegheny Station to restore worn track surfaces, WPXI reported. Those efforts sit alongside a much larger ask: PRT is pursuing $82.8 million in federal funding toward a $750 million plan to replace its entire aging fleet of light rail cars.
Officials have not released an updated condition for either the train passenger or the driver, and it remains unclear what role, if any, crossing signals played in Thursday's collision. For now, service has resumed at the Poplar Drive crossing, but the crash adds another entry to a corridor where cars and trains have met before.
