Train derails on curve, killing dozens in Japan

AMAGASAKI, Japan — The blue-and-silver carriage lay twisted against the wall of an apartment building, bent grotesquely around the corner by another ruptured car from the derailed commuter train. A third car lay flattened under the wreckage.

Hundreds of helmeted workers — their jumpsuits of orange, tan, blue, white and black denoting various government agencies — clambered over the torn metal Monday and into the early hours Tuesday pulling out the dead and injured in Japan's deadliest rail accident in four decades.

Investigators focused on excessive speed and a 23-year-old train driver's lack of experience after the crowded commuter train jumped the rails Monday on a curve and plowed into the apartment building just a few yards from the tracks.

The crews pulled 16 bodies from the twisted rail carriages overnight, pushing the death toll from 57 to 73. More than 440 people were injured.

Working under floodlights, the rescuers pulled out a conscious but seriously injured 46-year-old woman and took her to a hospital, police official Hiroshi Yamatani said.

Later, a 19-year-old college student was extracted from the crash, also seriously injured. Police at the crash site said there were other people still stuck in the cars, but none were responding, saying the student was probably the last one alive.

Distraught people rushed to hospitals looking for relatives who might have been injured or killed.

Takamichi Hayashi said his elder brother, 19-year-old Hiroki, might be among those still in the wreck. He said Hiroki had called their mother twice on a mobile phone from inside one of the train cars hours after the crash but remained unaccounted for.

"He told my mother: 'I'm in pain. I'm not going to make it,"' Hayashi said.

Jammed with 580 passengers, the seven-car train derailed at 9:18 a.m. on a curve near Amagasaki, about 250 miles west of Tokyo, then plowed through an automobile and slammed into the wall of the building's parking garage. Two of the five derailed train cars were flattened and one was bent around a corner of the building.

Officials said no cause had been ruled out but added that investigators suspected speed and the driver's less than a year on the job.

The driver — identified as Ryujiro Takami, 23 — was unaccounted for.

He got his train operator's license last May. A month later, he overshot a station and was issued a warning, railway officials and police said. Passengers said he also stopped too far past a station platform Monday just before the crash.

Tsunemi Murakami, safety director for train operator West Japan Railway Co., said it had not been determined how fast the train was traveling.

A surviving crew member told police he "felt the train was going faster than usual," public broadcaster NHK said.

That echoed comments from passengers who speculated the driver might have been speeding to make up for time lost when he overshot the previous station by 25 feet and had to back up. The train was nearly two minutes behind schedule, media reports said.

The crash occurred on a curve with a speed limit of 43 mph. Murakami estimated the train would have had to be traveling at 82 mph to have jumped the track purely because of excessive speed.

Some stretches of track in Japan have safety systems designed to stop trains at any sign of trouble without requiring drivers to take emergency action. But transport ministry officials said the automatic braking system along the stretch of track where the train crashed is among the oldest in Japan and can't halt trains traveling at high speeds.

Outside experts predicted investigators would find a combination of factors to blame.

"There are very few train accidents in Japan in which a train has flipped just because it was going too fast. There might have been several conditions at work — speed, winds, poor train maintenance or aging rails," Kazuhiko Nagase, a train expert who is a professor at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology, told NHK.

"For the train to flip, it had to be traveling at an extremely high speed," Nagase said.

Murakami said investigators also found evidence of rocks on the tracks, but hadn't determined whether that contributed to the crash.

Transport Minister Kazuo Kitagawa told reporters he would order all of Japan's railway operators to conduct safety inspections in the coming days.

"It's tragic," Kitagawa said at the scene. "We have to investigate why this horrible accident happened."

Deadly train accidents are rare in Japan, which is home to one of the world's most complex, efficient and heavily traveled rail networks. Monday's crash was the worst since 161 people died in a three-train crash in 1963 at Tsurumi, outside Tokyo.