TRAIN IN FLAMES

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 182, 1 May 1931, Page 9

TRAIN IN FLAMES

Passengers’ Terrible Fate 41 DEAD; 41 INJURED Futile Signals to Driver MANY LEAP FROM CARS By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright. Cairo, April 29. Forty-one persons were killed and forty-one injured in the worst disaster on record on the Egyptian Railways, when an express excursion train, crowded with holiday-makers, took fire between Cairo and Alexandria. The passengers frantically waved garments from the windows in an attempt to attract the driver’s attention, but the train went on at full speed, fanning the flames, which spread with terrific rapidity. The train was made up of some of the oldest rolling stock on the State railways, and the, rackety coaches flared like tinder. ' Indescribable scenes of panic followed. The screaming passengers in three coaches were either suffocated or burned, or chanced jumping out. The line near Benha was strewn i.ith maimed bodies as many of those leaping out,were caught in the wheels,and decapitated, or had their limbs torn off. The train travelled for a considerable distance before the signalman at Benha noticed the flames and set the signals at danger. The victims were all Egyptians going to Cairo for the Bairam festival. The dead include ten children, who were either trampled down in the packed compartments, or incinerated. The, fire is believed to have been due to an overheated axle in a thirdclass rear carriage. The driver was arrested.