3 killed as trains collide in Belgium
Print Edition
A LATE-NIGHT passenger train slammed into a slow-moving freight train in eastern Belgium, killing three people and sending nine others to the hospital, authorities said yesterday. The accident came just hours after reported lightning strikes and a signal disruption on the line.
Two cars from the passenger train derailed when it rear-ended the freight train around 11pm on Sunday in Hermalle-Sous-Huy, a hamlet on the Meuse River. Belgian prosecutor Brigitte Leroy said the passenger train was traveling around 100kph and the freight train 10-15kph at the time of the crash. Earlier reports had said the freight train was stopped.
Some of the nine people in hospital were in a critical condition and the death toll could rise, said Francis Dejon, mayor of St Georges-sur-Meuse. Twenty-seven other passengers were treated at the scene.
Dejon told a news conference that the passenger train’s first car was so badly damaged “it was curled back on itself.” The second of the six cars also derailed and came to a stop listing to the side.
Belgian railway police and state prosecutors were investigating the cause of the accident.
State broadcaster RTBF said the dead were two passengers and the train’s driver. RTBF TV said many of the passengers were students in their early 20s returning to school after the weekend.
It took rescuers three hours to free people from the wreckage of the passenger train, which carried around 40 people when it crashed 27 kilometers southwest of the city of Liege while traveling from Mouscron to Liers.
The wheels and axle of one train car were knocked loose by the impact. A large chunk of wreckage jutted up from the freight train of around 20 cars.
Belgium’s national railway operation, SNCB, said there was “a signals disruption” on the rail line about an hour and a half before the wreck occurred, but said the problem had been solved.
A spokesman for Infrabel, a separate company that oversees Belgium’s rail infrastructure, said installations where the crash occurred “were hit by lightning” earlier on Sunday but said it was premature to see this as causing the accident.
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