Frantic bid to save victim

Press, 21 October 1987, Page 10

Frantic bid to save victim

NZPA-PA London A British Rail driver and three passengers were drowned after their train plunged off a collapsed bridge into a raging river. Six other shocked passengers managed to escape. A guard and a British Rail official travelling on the ill-fated 5.20 a.m. Swansea to Shrewsbury service on Monday also managed to scramble

free. The two railmen ignored danger as they dragged people from the second coach which was in danger of slipping into the flooded river. Survivors told how one ■railman made a frantic grab for an old woman’s hair after her hand slipped from his grasp before she disappeared beneath the water. Another elderly woman,

Mrs Anne Angus, aged 65, summoned up a supreme effort to half swim, half crawl from the lost coach to be helped to safety. Also on board was a train inspector who was with the driver specifically to check the dangerous route as the twocoach diesel inched its way in darkness just before 8 a.m. on to the bridge over the River Tywi, West Wales.

He and the crew did not know that central sections of its span had been tom away. As the train ran on, the front coach pitched into the rain-swollen river, leaving the second coach hovering over the edge. Yesterday, British Raji defended its decision to let the train on to the bridge, describing tfie circumstances as “quite exceptional”