At least nine people were killed and 100 injured yesterday when a train plunged off one of Europe's busiest railway routes and ploughed into a house near Cologne in Germany.
Police said the death toll could rise as rescue workers sifted through the wreckage of the train, which investigators said was derailed as it broke the speed limit on a restricted section of the line. The government announced an inquiry.
Eighteen hours after the accident in the early hours of yesterday, a handful of the worst injured were still fighting for their lives while a further 22 people believed to be on the train were missing. They were listed as 16 Germans, four Americans and two Dutch citizens.
"We cannot rule out further deaths," a police spokesman, Mr Winrich Granitzka, told a news conference in the town of Bruehl, scene of the accident 15 km south of Cologne.
He said workers using cranes and other heavy-duty machinery would continue searching for bodies. Rail officials said the train, travelling from Amsterdam to Basle with 300 passengers on board, was travelling at 120 k.p.h. as it negotiated points intended to divert it past building work on the track just outside Bruehl station. The speed limit for the diversion was 40 k.p.h. The crash was the worst in Germany since the Eschede disaster of 1998, the country's biggest post-war rail tragedy in which 101 people were killed. The Federal Transport Minister, Mr Reinhard Klimmt, announced a "thorough and all-encompassing inquiry into the causes of this tragic accident". Five carriages and the engine left the track just outside Bruehl railway station and two carriages plummeted down an embankment into the house, landing in its living-room and front garden. The elderly couple living in the house were unharmed.
Many of the passengers on board were skiers heading towards destinations in the Alps. Apart from Germans, there were many Dutch, British, Italian and Americans, police said.
"We hit something hard and then the whole carriage flipped over," said one British backpacker. "They put up ladders for us to climb out of the window, and some managed to jump out," said a young American man.
Rail officials said the train was not one of the high-speed InterCity Express trains like the one in the Eschede crash, which smashed into a bridge after it developed a faulty wheel.
Police were waiting to question the 28-year-old German driver, who survived the accident but was suffering from shock.
Recordings taken by the train's "black box" showed the driver initially slowed down to 50 k.p.h. in the run-up to the switch but then accelerated back up to 120 k.p.h., the usual speed limit for the stretch without the diversion, officials said.
The "Castle Brewery" bar on platform four at Bruehl station was transformed into an emergency first-aid centre as injured passengers flooded in.
"The train driver rushed in first, wanting to get to the phone," said a 26-year-old barman, Mr Sascha Kopp. "But he was completely out of it," he said. Rescue workers brought some of the most seriously injured passengers into the bar, turning it into an emergency treatment centre.