Investigators kept open the possibility on Monday that a weekend train wreck in the south of England that killed seven people was the result of a motorist’s suicide bid.
The London to Plymouth express train, travelling at 160km an hour with 300 passengers on board, slammed into a station wagon at a level crossing at Ufton Nervet, near Reading, on Saturday.
The eight-carriage train, operated by First Great Western, jumped off the tracks, killing six people at the scene and injuring about 100 others, including one person who died on Sunday in hospital.
The dead include the train’s driver.
Police revealed on Sunday that an off-duty police officer saw the car on the track as the barriers at the level crossing came down, and frantically tried to telephone a warning to an emergency number.
As work crews began to remove the wreckage and clear the track that runs to southwest England, British transport police deputy chief constable Andy Trotter said investigators were keeping an open mind as to the cause.
He said there was ”no reason to believe there was any defect with the crossing” — leaving investigators to focus on the station wagon and its driver, so far identified only as a male.
”We will examine the motor vehicle to see if there is any mechanical defects and obviously we will take into consideration the evidence of the police officer, seeing a motor vehicle on the crossing and making no attempt to leave,” Trotter said.
”We do not close our minds to any theory of what have happened.
That’s why we are going through all the evidence on the track side and taking statements from witnesses.”
Describing the disaster, he said: ”This is a particularly shocking scene bearing in mind this was a collision with a car.”
”There is incredible devastation, the damage to the train, the damage to the tracks. I think it is a most shocking sight. The awful ordeal those people must have gone through on that train.”
FirstGroup, which runs First Great Western trains, said in a statement it would be doing everything possible to minimise disruption to passengers following the weekend’s crash.
Saturday’s disaster was the worst on Britain’s privatised rail network since May 2002 when seven people were killed when a passenger train derailed at Potters Bar, north of London.
It followed the release of a Health and Safety Executive report identifying the 8 000-odd level crossings throughout Britain as the greatest source of ”catastrophic risk” for the country’s railways. – Sapa-AFP