One person was killed and dozens injured, hospitals said, when a high-speed passenger train derailed on Friday, leaving carriages skidding down an embankment in remote north-west England.
The train, thought to be carrying about 180 people, flew off the rails in darkness and foul weather, leaving several carriages on their sides and one held half on the tracks, tangled in a power cable.
Police, ambulances, firefighting crews, mountaineering rescue teams and Royal Air Force helicopters rushed to the scene, with the more serious casualties airlifted to the nearest hospitals.
The Royal Lancaster Infirmary said that one of the patients it received had died.
”We can confirm there has been a fatality,” a spokesperson said. ”Other than that, we can give no further information. We are still in the middle of a major incident.”
Earlier, the infirmary said that 12 people had been airlifted in, three of whom were in a critical condition.
The local Cumbria Ambulance Service said that 77 passengers had been injured, 65 were classed as walking wounded and 12 had been taken to hospital with serious injuries.
All those on board had been accounted for, but the nine carriages were nonetheless being double-checked, a spokesperson said.
”The fire and rescue service are now using thermal imaging equipment to do a final assessment to make sure nobody has been missed,” she said.
Police, rail authorities and the train’s operator, Virgin Trains, said it was too early to speculate what might have caused the derailment.
Inspectors from the independent Rail Accident Investigation Branch were at the scene, beginning their investigation.
The 5.15pm service from London Euston station to Glasgow Central station derailed near the village of Grayrigg, in an area served by single-track country roads about 8km north-east of Kendal, a tourist town on the edge of the mountainous Lake District.
The train was a modern Pendolino, which can tilt to travel faster on curved stretches of track, and reach speeds of 200km/h.
A Network Rail spokesperson said the line speed for the area where the crash happened was 153 km/h.
Witnesses described what happened as the incident unfolded. Caroline Thomson, a senior BBC executive on board, told BBC television by cellphone that the train ”lurched very badly from side to side” before the carriage she was in ended up on its side.
”It was terrifying, then it came off the rails,” she said. ”There was a moment when it turned on its side when you thought, ‘Am I going to be very seriously hurt here?’ You thought to yourself, ‘Just a minute, this is really nasty.”’
Her cellphone pictures showed emergency service workers treating people at the scene and the interior of a carriage on its side.
Passenger Ruth Colton told BBC television by phone that she escaped from the third carriage, which had jumped off the tracks and slid down an embankment.
”It started to get really kind of bumpy and then suddenly the carriage flipped over. I grabbed hold of the arm rest and there were bags and bottles flying everywhere,” she said. — Sapa-AFP