Ten dead, 23 hurt after passenger and cargo trains collide in German countryside

A HEAD-ON collision between a cargo train and a passenger train killed ten people and injured 23 others in eastern Germany, and left wreckage scattered across a frost-covered field, in one of the country's worst ever railway accidents.

• A police officer walks along the railway track in front of the collision damaged locomotive of a freight train at the scene of an accident where a passenger train collided head on with a freight train killing 10 people and leaving many more injured in Hordorf, some 190 km west of Berlin. Pic: AFP

The trains crashed in heavy fog late on Saturday on a single-line track near the village of Hordorf, close to Saxony-Anhalt's state capital Magdeburg, throwing the passenger train from the track and tipping it onto its side. The front rows of the first passenger compartment were crushed and several seats lay outside the train. Both trains caught fire, but most of the dead were killed on impact, police said.

"The crash was so strong that the passenger train was catapulted off the tracks," Armin Friedrich, the police officer in charge of the rescue efforts, said at a news conference in Hordorf, about 125 miles south-west of Berlin. Nearly 200 police and rescue workers were sent to the crash site.

An investigation into the cause of the crash is now under way, and experts said they were still looking at all possibilities, including technical failure and human error. State governor Wolfgang Boehmer, who visited the site yesterday, told reporters one of the drivers may have missed a red signal.

Holger Hoevelmann, the interior minister of Saxony-Anhalt, said: "We are still speechless and shocked by the images and the level of destruction."

The passenger train operated by Harze Elbe Express was on its way from Magdeburg to Halberstadt with about 50 passengers aboard, moving at a speed of 62mph, when it crashed with the cargo train, which was travelling at 50mph. The cargo train, run by Peine-Salzgitter, was carrying calcium carbonate.

The dark imprints of some of the bodies that had been removed could be seen on the white frosty ground next to the crash site.

Because of the heavy fog, rescue helicopters were not able to fly the injured to nearby hospitals and they had to be taken by ambulance instead. Most of the injured were so severely hurt that doctors fear the death toll could rise.

Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her condolences, saying: "My thoughts are with the families of the victims."