Twenty-nine killed in train crash

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33776, 24 February 1975, Page 1

Twenty-nine killed in train crash

• (New Zealand Press Association —Copyright)

OSLO, February 23. At least 29 people were killed in a head-on crash between two trains carrying holidaying skiers in northern Norway yesterday.

The two trains ploughed into each other 125 miles north of Oslo, at Tretten.

A police official said in a radio report from the scene that rescue work, hampered by snow, was progressing slowly. "We have managed to get all the injured out, but there are still several dead inside

i one of the cars, which is 'badly crushed,” he said. The Railway Commission has begun an investigation. “We do not know the reason for the accident,” a spokesman said. Both trains — one bound from Oslo to Trondheim and the other from Trondheim to Oslo -— had 12 cars.

Agence France-Pressp quoted a police source at the site as saying several bodies were still trapped inside the crushed carriage, and that the full death toll was still unknown.

i Norwegian police and i rescue authorities said they had recovered 12 bodies, and | that 26 persons were injured, ’ 15 of them critically.

Railway officials said most of the passengers were Scandinavians either going to ior returning from ski-ing vacations, but said there could have been foreigners among victims, some of whom had not yet been identified. “The whole scene looked

I terrible,” said 22-year-old |Erland Rasmussen. “One car I was standing on the top of another. I did not realise at I once that there had been a 'crash.”