Trains collide in Hunan, killing 3

• Source: Global Times
• [07:31 June 30 2009]
• Comments

By Kang Juan

A passenger train crashed into another yesterday in Chenzhou, Hunan Province, killing at least three people and injuring 63.

A passenger train yesterday passes the scene where two Shenzhen-bound trains collided at 2:34 am Monday at Chenzhou railway station in Hunan Province, leaving at least three people dead and more than 60 injured. Photo: Xinhua

The collision occurred at 2:34 am yesterday at the Chenzhou railway station. Train K9017, traveling from the provincial capital Changsha to Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, collided with another Shenzhen-bound train, K9063, forcing their locomotives and several cars off the tracks, the Guangzhou Railway Group, which operates the station and the two passenger trains, told the Global Times by e-mail yesterday.

The cause of the crash is still under investigation by the Railways Ministry and the Hunan provincial government, a local publicity official said.

The two trains collided at the Feihongqiao railway crossing. Yan Ke, a reporter for People's Daily, said K9017 crashed into K9063, which had just started to move.

One of the trains crashed into two neighboring houses, collapsing them and trapping several people inside. A reporter from the Changsha-based Xiaoxiang Morning Post revealed that two people were killed on the train and one died in a damaged house.

Wang Rong, 22, a college graduate from Hunan, remained hospitalized yesterday in Chenzhou No. 4 People's Hospital. She was on a job-hunting trip to Shenzhen as she boarded train K9017 in Changsha. Wang said she was seated in the aisle in the fourth car of the train.

“The carriage suddenly began shaking very badly. I didn't realize it was a train collision until I found myself lying on the rail track after I briefly blacked out. My legs were hurt. I managed to get to the platform as many co-passengers did. The paramedics came about 30 minutes later and sent some of us to the hospitals,” Wang told the Global Times in a telephone interview.

Witnesses said residents nearby came to the rescue immediately, with more than 1,000 rescue workers later summoned by the local government.

The fourth car of the K9017 train was the most seriously damaged. It took more than an hour to remove a sheet of iron from an injured child, local firemen told Beijing's Legal Mirror newspaper.

Injured passengers were under medical observation in three local hospitals yesterday. As of yesterday evening, six of the seriously wounded were out of danger and were in a stable condition, the Guangzhou Railway Group said. Other stranded passengers were transported by buses or trains to their destinations by 9 am.

Services of the Beijing-Guangzhou railway line, along which lies Chenzhou station, resumed yesterday after emergency repairs by local railway workers.

A railway worker surnamed Dong, who works for the Chenzhou railway station, joined in the repair effort. He told the Global Times that “this is the worst train accident that has ever happened in Chenzhou,” that he could recall.

Yang Hao, a railway specialist, outlined three possibilities that might have caused the wreck, first noting the possible malfunction of the computer-based automatic points control system.

If the system was operational when the incident occurred, the train drivers might be responsible, as they may have failed to acknowledge the signals. If it was the system that went wrong at that moment, railway dispatchers must dispatch all the trains in the subsection line without computer guidance, and errors might have happened in different stages of the complex process. A third possibility is misconduct by the Chenzhou railway station, Yang said.

“We can only make a judgment on the basis of detailed information from the trains' data recorders,” Yang said.

In April 2008, 72 people were killed and 416 were injured when a high-speed passenger train jumped its tracks and slammed into another in Shandong Province.

That train crash was the worst in China since 1997, when 126 people were killed in Hunan.

Last month, Railways Minister Liu Zhijun was given a demerit by the State Council as punishment for the crash 13 months earlier.

Qiu Wei and Zhang Han contributed to this story.