Despite the frantic efforts of subway riders who tried to pull her from the tracks, a 53-year-old Manhattan woman was struck and killed by a train on the Lexington Avenue line early yesterday morning after she tried to retrieve her purse, police said.

The woman, Jean Eng, who lived in Chinatown, was waiting for an uptown no. 6 train at the south end of the station at 23rd Street and Park Avenue, shortly after 10 a.m. yesterday.

Based on interviews with witnesses, police gave the following account.

Eng accidentally dropped her purse onto the train tracks. She lowered herself down onto the train bed near the tunnel entrance to retrieve her handbag. Upon retrieving it, however, she found herself trapped in the track bed, which is about 4 1/2 feet below the platform. Eng could not pull herself back up.

Concerned subway riders rushed to her aid, and a few may have even jumped onto the tracks to help push her back onto the platform, police said.

The bystanders’ efforts proved useless. A train entered the station, and while Eng managed to avoid being struck by the first car, she was struck several times by the second and third passing cars before the train came to a halt.

The specific cause of Eng’s death was not immediately determined. An autopsy will be conducted today, according to the medical examiner’s office.

Investigators from the transit agency could not say yesterday whether the train’s motorman had seen Eng down on the tracks and if the motorman had tried to stop the train to avoid her.

Because Eng was located near the subway tunnel’s entrance, the accident occurred out of sight of the token booth clerk on duty at the time, transit officials said.

If subway riders had shined a flashlight down the tunnels to alert the oncoming train’s conductor of an accident, Eng’s death might have been avoided, one transit activist, Ellyn Shannon, said.

“It is usually a matter of seconds, but it might have been helpful if people knew about this universal sign for distress,” Ms. Shannon, a planner with the transit advocacy group the Permanent Citizens Advisory Council, said.

Advertisements in the subways and cable-television commercials paid for by New York City Transit warn people not to attempt to retrieve lost property from the train beds, a press representative from the transit workers union, Dave Katzman, said.

Without the presence of station agents to assist passengers when they do lose items on the train tracks, however, accidents like this are more likely to happen, Mr. Katzman said. “The station booths are havens of safety in many ways,” Mr. Katzman said.

This year, the MTA is expected to close 164 token booths across the city.

Yesterday’s accident marked the seventh time a subway train has struck and killed someone this year, police said. The last time was at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday only a few stations away on the same line, when a 59-year-old man jumped in front of a 6 train. That death was classified as a suicide.

According to police statistics, subway trains struck 80 people in 2003 and 75 people in 2004, accounting for about 40 deaths each year. It was unclear last night how many of those deaths were classified as accidents, suicides, or homicides.