SPRINGVILLE — Dave Walker left for work Monday morning in a crisp white shirt and tie.

He came home that evening and burned the shirt, which was covered with blood after hours of helping wounded passengers out of the mangled remains of a Washington, D.C., transit train.

"It was pretty gross," the 25-year-old from Springville said. "I don't think most of it was mine. I had some cuts, but not that (many)."

Walker was on a Red Line metro train Monday when it collided with a stationary train in northeast Washington D.C., killing nine people and injuring dozens.

Ironically, it was the first time Walker had taken the east-side route. Normally, he said, he makes the one-hour commute to his summer internship via the west-side route.

Walker, who had been standing up, said he felt a little bump, then the trains collided and he went tumbling down the aisle. He avoided whiplash but banged his leg and shoulder and got a few cuts from broken glass.

"It's hard to tell exactly what is sore," said Walker, a student at BYU. "You just hurt everywhere."

Despite the surreal nature of the crash, Walker said most people were surprisingly calm. For those who weren't, Walker said he used his dad's famous distraction method when he talked with them.

"They'd be wearing a Nationals shirt, and we'd talk about baseball or something completely other than (the accident)," he said. "It helped. We would be talking about baseball in the middle of a train wreck, but it calmed them down."

It was only after getting home that Walker remembered his cell phone in his pocket. It had turned off in the commotion, and he turned it back on to find more than a dozen frantic messages and texts from family and friends back home.

"I was like, 'If people in Utah know, it must have been a pretty big deal,' " Walker said. Only after reading news reports online did he learn the extent of the damage and the injuries.

Despite the tragedy, he's not worried about traveling by train. It was just a freak accident, he said. One in a million. He's back riding the Red Line again and just considers himself lucky.

"I got in a train wreck, and I didn't really get hurt," Walker said. "I always figured there were no survivors in a train crash. It seems weird … but I really feel like I was there to help out."

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