Two Italian commuter trains collided Tuesday in the southern region of Puglia, killing a dozen people, firefighters said.
Dozens of others were injured when the two trains, each with four cars, collided head-on near the town of Andria on a line with just a single track, according to news agency ANSA and Sky TG24.
A still photo of the crash showed cars crumpled together and forced off the tracks at sharp angles. News reports said rescue workers were pulling victims from the rubble, including a small child who was alive. Video images showed ambulances responding to the scene with other rescue workers.
“Some of the cars are completely crumpled and the rescuers are extracting people from the metal, many of them injured,” Riccardo Zingaro, the chief of the local police in Andria, told ANSA at the scene.
National police and Carabinieri couldn’t immediately give details about the extent of the crash, saying they were in the middle of responding.
Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, said the train crash “is a moment of tears” and pledged not to stop until a cause was determined.
Renzi spoke in Milan but was returning to Rome to monitor the situation.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
I’m going to guess the cause may have something to do with two trains headed in opposite directions being on the same track. It sounds like some bureaucrat wasn’t doing their job.
OBUMBA WAS THE TRAIN MASTER.
Guess we better ban trains.
A very good guess is the signals being ignored by the train engineers running the trains on the same set of tracks in the opposite direction. Had the engineers would have paid attention to the signals, the train accident would have been prevented. Auto accidents happen on a far greater scale because there are more people driving cars and there are more accidents where people are killed in auto accidents that happen everyday, train accidents, plane crashes, cruise ship accidents, bus accidents happen on a far less scale & it makes news, but auto accidents are everyday that it
doesn’t make news unless a well known person & well known people are involved in it.