by Toby Sterling
VOORSCHOTEN, Netherlands (Reuters) – One person was killed and dozens more were injured, many of them seriously, when a train carrying at least 50 passengers in the Netherlands derailed on Tuesday after hitting a maintenance crane on the track, authorities and local media said.
Maintenance work was planned but “we have no idea why the crane ended up on the track which was still open to traffic”, said John Voppen, the leader of ProRail, the manager of the Dutch railway infrastructure.
Rescuers evacuated the injured before dawn to the scene of the accident, which happened around 03:25 (01:25 GMT) near the village of Voorschoten located between The Hague and Leiden.
Some injured were treated on the spot, others were collected by the neighborhood while 19 people were hospitalized.
Traffic is suspended for several days between The Hague and Leiden, one of the busiest lines in the Netherlands, ProRail said.
Several investigations have been opened to understand the reasons for the accident, authorities said.
A spokesman for the national rail company said a freight train also hit the crane.
Dutch construction group BAM told the NRC daily and the ANP news agency that one of its employees died in the accident.
The driver of the passenger train was hospitalized with broken bones, said Wouter Koolmees, chief executive of NS, the country’s main train operator.
According to the emergency services, the lead car derailed and crashed in a field, the second car overturned and a fire broke out near the train before being quickly brought under control.
The Prime Minister and the Royal Family of the Netherlands expressed their solidarity with the victims.
(Report Toby Sterling in Voorschoten, Anthony Deutsch, Bart Meijer in Amsterdam, Akriti Sharma in Bangalore, Benoit Van Overstraeten in Paris; written by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Ingrid Melander; French version Jean Terzian and Laetitia Volga, edited by Jean-Stéphane Brosse and Matthew Protard)
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