At least 25 killed and 50 injured in Italian train crash

At least 25 people were killed and another 50 injured in Puglia on Tuesday in one of the worst Italian train crashes in modern times.

Two local trains travelling from between the small centres of Andria and Corato and vice-versa crashed head on on Tuesday at high speed on a one-track railway line.

Rescue workers arriving at the scene were confronted with a scene of devastation.

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Rescuers work at the site of the crash. Photograph: Stringer/Reuters

At least two carriages of the trains appeared to have totally disintegrated in the impact of the collision. Parts of the carriages were sprayed around the olive groves which lined either side of the rural track.

“I found a horrific terrifying scene,” said one of the first policemen to arrive on the crash scene. “There were dead people, there were people screaming for help, stuck in the wreckage, there were passengers crying their eyes out, totally shattered . . . It was the worst thing I have ever seen.”

Cause of disaster

Initial speculation about the cause of the disaster has focused on the possibility that, for whatever reason, one of the two trains did not respect its scheduled timetable, moving out of the station too early, suggesting that the disaster was most probably the result of human error.

The disaster will also prompt serious questions about the level of infrastructural investment in transport services. Some 70 per cent of railway lines in the mezzogiorno, the Italian south, are single track.

Where those lines are run by the Italian state railway service, the single track is controlled by a computerised system called the SCMT (sistema di controllo marcia treno), which not only automatically regulates a train’s speed but also blocks a train if another train is too close on the same line.

In that case, the blocked train either remains in a station or pulls into one of a number of “lay-bys” on the one line system, and waits for the other train to go past.

Tuesday’s tragedy happened on a section of the railway system which has remained in private hands since it was founded in 1937 by Count Ugo Pasquini.

Now run by FerroTramviaria, this section of the line has not installed a SCMT or similar computerised controlling mechanism.

Instead, the safety of the service was guaranteed essentially by telephonic communications between the two stations at either end of the line, in this case Andria and Corato.

Furthermore, investigators may want to understand why work to modernise much of the railway system around Bari, including doubling of the tracks on that section of the line where today’s tragedy occurred, has yet to begin.

EU funding for the project was approved in April 2012.

Commuters and students

The trains which crashed are likely to have been transporting commuters and students heading to Bari as well as people travelling to the regional airport.

Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi and his transport minister Graziano Delrio both travelled to the scene of the crash in the afternoon, with the prime minister tweeting: “We have only tears and pain for the victims and their families. But we are also very angry. We want to know what happened in Puglia this morning.”

The disaster inevitably caught the medical services in the Bari regional area off guard. By mid-morning, appeals were being sent out for people to give blood, an appeal which prompted long queues of donors tonight.

By European standards, Italian railway systems are relatively safe. Of 59 people killed on the railways in Italy last year, 58 were killed when knocked down by trains as they crossed railway tracks, most often in stations.