At least four people were killed and dozens injured in a collision between a passenger train and a goods convoy on Wednesday evening in the central Czech Republic, according to emergency services.
“Four passengers suffered injuries that led to their deaths,” Alena Kisiala, a spokeswoman for local rescue services, told Czech public television.
Referring to “a great disaster”, Prime Minister Petr Fiala offered his condolences. “We are all thinking of the victims and the injured,” he wrote on the social network X.
According to public television, the accident occurred shortly before 9:00 p.m. GMT near Pardubice train station, about 100 km east of Prague.
About 300 passengers, many of them foreigners, were on the train, she said, showing images of a derailed carriage and survivors boarding buses near Pardubice’s main station.
“The rescue work was complicated because the first wagon was deformed. This made access to the injured difficult,” firefighter Pavel Ber told journalists on site.
Around sixty firefighters, two helicopters and nine ambulances were mobilized, according to the emergency services.
– To Ukraine –
Arriving on site around 11:00 p.m. GMT at the same time as the Minister of Transport, Interior Minister Vit Rakusan declared that most of the injured were slightly injured, and that the uninjured passengers were temporarily accommodated in Pardubice station.
The train of the private company Regiojet linked Prague to the Ukrainian town of Chop, on the border with Slovakia.
According to official timetables, the train left Prague on Wednesday at 7:52 p.m. GMT and was due to leave Pardubice at 8:47 p.m. GMT. He was expected in Chop at 08:35 GMT on Thursday after crossing Slovakia from west to east.
The freight train was carrying calcium carbide, fire department spokeswoman Vendula Horakova told state television. It is an industrial product used to make acetylene, a hydrocarbon often used as a welding fuel.
The main railway line linking Prague to Brno and Ostrava, the country’s second and third cities respectively, will remain closed for several hours, Transport Minister Martin Kupka said.
An investigation is underway into the causes of the accident, he said.
Pardubice was the scene of the worst railway accident in the country’s history, in 1960: 118 people died and around a hundred injured in a head-on collision between two passenger trains north of the town.
