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Several still trapped in Japan train wreck, 71 dead
Rescuers pulled three people alive from the mangled wreckage of a Japanese commuter train early on Tuesday while others remained trapped as the death toll rose to 71 in Japan's worst rail accident in more than 40 years.
Investigations into the cause of the accident were focusing on the speed the crowded train was traveling when it jumped the tracks in the suburbs of the western city of Osaka and smashed into an apartment building shortly after rush hour on Monday.
Two women and a man were pulled alive from the crumpled carriages between midnight and about 7 a.m. (1800 EDT) on Tuesday and rescuers were trying to get to others in the tangled mass of metal around the apartment building's car park.
Investigators said the cause of crash was still unclear, but survivors among the some 580 passengers and the train's conductor said they felt the train was going faster than normal after falling behind schedule.
The train had overshot the previous station and had to reverse back to the platform.
The train's driver, a 23-year-old man with 11 months experience, was still missing on Tuesday morning.
The same driver also over-shot a station by 100 meters (328 feet) last June, railway officials said.
JR West, which was completely privatized a year ago, has been experiencing sluggish revenue growth and has been trying to improve profitability by cutting costs.
"If that made the company neglect its safety responsibilities, that would be a problem," the Yomiuri Shimbun daily said in an editorial.
Officials said a train could derail if it were traveling at nearly twice the 70 km per hour (43 mph) speed limit on the curved stretch of line where the accident occurred.
The automatic train stop system in the area was of the oldest type and had no ability to apply automatic brakes if a passing train was going too fast, the Transport Ministry said.
Five of the train's seven cars derailed.
It was the worst train accident in Japan since 1963 when about 160 people were killed in a multiple train collision at Yokohama, near Tokyo, and the worst since Japan's rail network was privatized in 1987.
Satoru Sone, a expert at Kogakuin University, told NHK the over-run might have indicated a problem with the brakes. Faulty rails could also not be discounted, he said.
JR West said investigators found marks on the tracks of the type left when a train runs over an object such as a stone, but it said it was not clear if this was related to the accident. Japanese trains generally have a good safety record. In Japan's last major accident, in March 2000, five people were killed and 33 were hurt when a Tokyo subway train ripped away the side of a carriage of an oncoming train that had derailed in its path during rush hour. In May 1991, 42 people were killed and more than 600 injured in a crash in Shigaraki, western Japan. Shares in JR West closed down 3.6 percent on Monday in a slightly higher overall market. |
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