Photo by ep_jhu.

A 25-year-old from Maryland and a 20-year-old from Pennsylvania have been identified as the two CSX workers who were killed by an Amtrak train in Northeast on Tuesday night.

Stephen Deal and Jake Lafave, a conductor and a conductor-in-training, were inspecting a freight train in the 1200 block of New York Avenue NE, just outside of Union Station, when a D.C.-bound Amtrak train struck them.

Police responded to the scene at 11:45 p.m. and found there were no signs consistent with life. The Chief Medical Officer has ruled the manner of death as accidental and the cause was due to multiple injuries.

There were 121 people on board the southbound passenger train, none of whom were injured.

The National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation of the incident; a preliminary report is expected in a week or two, according to a spokesman.

NTSB officials have said that the CSX train received an alert that there was a problem with the wheels, which is why the train was stopped near Union Station. At some point, the two CSX crew members walked on to the active track where Amtrak was operating.

The incident occurred in an area where there are four sets of tracks nearby, two of which belong to CSX and two belong to Amtrak, according to NTSB board member Earl Weener.

A union representative told WTOP that the CSX workers couldn’t have warned the Amtrak conductor of their presence because they operate on different radio frequencies.

“There wouldn’t have been any interactional communication between the crews unless CSX had notified either Amtrak or possibly the tower in Union Station that they had a crew that was either on the ground or had a train with a problem,” said Herbert Harris, who represents Amtrak engineers as the D.C. representative for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. “That may very well be one of the issues that they look into: the communication with who, and what if any notification had been given.”

Amtrak resumed service on Wednesday with speed restrictions in place.