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67 killed in Japan train derailment
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-04-26 07:37
AMAGASAKI, Japan - Investigators focused on excessive speed and a 23-year-old
train driver's lack of experience after a crowded commuter train jumped the
rails on a curve Monday and plowed into an apartment building, causing Japan's
deadliest rail accident in four decades.
Rescuers worked through the night trying to free survivors from twisted rail
carriages left when the train hit the nine-story building's parking garage,
killing at least 67 people and injuring 442.
It was not clear if any bystanders or apartment residents were among the
victims, but the number of dead increased overnight by 10 — from 57 to 67 — when
more bodies were found early Tuesday.
Rescuers working under floodlights pulled out a conscious but seriously
injured 46-year-old woman and took her to a hospital, and worked to dig out
another man, police said.
Two men were trapped in the same car. They were conscious and receiving
emergency medical care but rescuers were hampered by worries about leaked fuel,
said Shohei Matsuda, an Amagasaki fire department official. Others also were
caught in the wreckage and feared dead.
Distraught people rushed to hospitals looking for relatives who might have
been injured or killed.
Takamichi Hayashi said his elder brother, 19-year-old Hiroki, might be among
those still in the wreck. He said Hiroki had called their mother twice on a
mobile phone from inside one of the train cars hours after the crash but
remained unaccounted for.
"He told my mother: 'I'm in pain. I'm not going to make it,'" Hayashi said.
Jammed with 580 passengers, the seven-car train derailed at 9:18 a.m. on a
curve near Amagasaki, about 250 miles west of Tokyo, then plowed through an
automobile and slammed into the wall of the building's parking garage. Two of
the five derailed train cars were flattened and one was bent around a corner of
the building.
Officials said no cause had been ruled out but added that investigators
suspected speed and the driver's less than a year on the job.
The driver — identified as Ryujiro Takami, 23 — was unaccounted for.
He got his train operator's license last May. A month later, he overshot a
station and was issued a warning, railway officials and police said. Passengers
said he also stopped too far past a station platform Monday just before the
crash.
Tsunemi Murakami, safety director for train operator West Japan Railway Co.,
said it had not been determined how fast the train was traveling.
A surviving crew member told police he "felt the train was going faster than
usual," public broadcaster NHK said.
That echoed comments from passengers who speculated the driver might have
been speeding to make up for time lost when he overshot the previous station by
25 feet and had to back up. The train was nearly two minutes behind schedule,
media reports said.
The crash occurred on a curve with a speed limit of 43 mph. Murakami
estimated the train would have had to be traveling at 82 mph to have jumped the
track purely because of excessive speed.
Some stretches of track in Japan have safety systems designed to stop trains
at any sign of trouble without requiring drivers to take emergency action. But
transport ministry officials said the automatic braking system along the stretch
of track where the train crashed is among the oldest in Japan and can't halt
trains traveling at high speeds.
Outside experts predicted investigators would find a combination of factors
to blame.
"There are very few train accidents in Japan in which a train has flipped
just because it was going too fast. There might have been several conditions at
work — speed, winds, poor train maintenance or aging rails," Kazuhiko Nagase, a
train expert who is a professor at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology, told
NHK.
"For the train to flip, it had to be traveling at an extremely high speed,"
Nagase said.
Murakami said investigators also found evidence of rocks on the tracks, but
hadn't determined whether that contributed to the crash.
Transport Minister Kazuo Kitagawa told reporters he would order all of
Japan's railway operators to conduct safety inspections in the coming days.
"It's tragic," Kitagawa said at the scene. "We have to investigate why this
horrible accident happened."
Deadly train accidents are rare in Japan, which is home to one of the world's
most complex, efficient and heavily traveled rail networks. Monday's crash was
the worst since 161 people died in a three-train crash in 1963 at Tsurumi,
outside Tokyo.
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