Rail disaster kills 40

Press, 17 April 1978, Page 9

Rail disaster kills 40

NZPA-Reuter Bologna

Rescue teams worked through Saturday night under floodlights in a starch for survivors of Italy’s worst rail crash in years, which claimed more than 40 lives.

The police feared several more victims could be buried under the wreckage of th Venice-Rome express, which skidded off the rails near Bologna on Saturday, and the passenger train which ploughed into it. Early yesterday the death toll rose to 41 with the discovery of two badly mutilated corpses in the debris of the passenger train.

Some 120 people were injured, many of them seriously as carriages from the express plunged down a steep embankment after being derailed in a heavy rainstorm.

The passenger train smashed into carriages from, the express strewn across its path. Hundreds of passengers, including some American and Japanese families, clambered from the wreckage screaming fo. help. “It was a ghastly scene,” said one survivor. “There were bodies everywhere. I saw people without arms, without legs.” Railways officials pinned tie cause of the crash, the worst in Italy since 1962, on the rain which covered the track with mud as the express train approached Munzono, about 25km south of Bologna.

The driver of the train going the other way, en route from the southern tcwn of Lecce to, Milan, managed to slow down but was unable to stop in time. Ha was killed instantly.