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Train crash could kill over 13
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AT least 13 people died and more than 70 were hurt in a freak train crash on Wednesday morning involving a car and two speeding trains, the latest disaster to hit Britain's jinxed railway system.
About 10 people were seriously hurt in the accident which occurred in the village of Great Heck, near Selby in Yorkshire, about 320 km north of London.
Hospital staff said that two of them, one with a collapsed lung and the other with internal bleeding, were clinging on to life on Thursday.
Britain's ramshackle railways have seen a series of fatal accidents in recent years, but for once, this crash appeared to be the result of a tragic, improbable sequence of events rather than any mechanical or maintenance problems.
That sequence of events started when a Land Rover towing a Renault estate car on a trailer careered off the M62 motorway, down an embankment and came to rest on the southbound railway track.
The driver of the Land Rover scrambled free and telephoned emergency services. A police spokesman said the man shouted: "The train is coming."
Seconds later, the operator on the other end of the line heard a loud bang as a passenger train travelling from Newcastle, northeast England, to London, ploughed into the stranded vehicle at high speed.
The train left the rails and ended up on the northbound track. It stayed upright as it pushed the Land Rover some 500 metres down the track.
But the fateful piece of bad luck was that just at that moment, a northbound freight train carrying some 1,000 tonnes of coal thundered towards the derailed passenger train.
Unable to brake in time, it slammed into the passenger train, scattering the lead carriages in all directions. One carriage from the passenger train finished up, upright, in a field some 50 metres from the track.
In a ghoulish coincidence, one of the locomotives on the passenger train was the same one that had been pulling a train which derailed last year at Hatfield near London, killing four passengers.
With four fatal crashes in as many years, Britain's rail system stands accused of putting profits ahead of safety.
(SD-Agencies)
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