Canadian man among 7 killed in Amtrak train crash in Philadelphia

TORONTO — A Canadian man has been identified as one of the seven people killed Tuesday when an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia.

Abid Gilani was a senior vice-president for Wells Fargo in New York City and had been with the company for about a year, according to his profile page on LinkedIn.

A company spokeswoman says Gilani was a married father of two who split his time between Washington and New York.

Gilani’s wife, Diane, told reporters in Rockville, Maryland that her husband was a “dear person … a kind family man.”

“We have suffered a tremendous loss today. He’ll be sorely missed … he was really a wonderful person.”

Gilani said she and her husband are both from Canada and had moved to the United States “decades ago” but still have family ties in Ontario

The New York Daily News has reported that Gilani was 55 and was returning to New York from Virginia where he and his mother, who lives in Toronto, had attended the funeral of her brother.

Before joining Wells Fargo, Gilani had been with Marriott International for eight years.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Gilani attended Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., and the University of Saskatchewan before working as a mine planning engineer in Saskatoon and then with ScotiaBank and RBC Dominion Securities.

Prior to joining Wells Fargo in New York, Gilani spent about eight years with the Mariott International hotel chain.

Federal investigators said Wednesday that the Amtrak train was hurtling at about 170 kilometres an hour before it ran off the rails along a sharp curve where the speed limit drops to just 80 km/h.

A spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board said the engineer had applied the emergency brakes moments before the crash but slowed the train to only 164 km/h by the time the locomotive’s black box stopped recording data.

With files from The Associated Press