By
Associated Press
GREAT HECK, England - With a high-speed passenger train bearing down on his Land Rover stuck on the train tracks, the frantic motorist called an emergency number, but it was too late. "The train's coming!" he shouted into his mobile phone - just before it hit.
In a bizarre wreck that left at least 13 dead and more than 70 injured, the passenger train smashed into the Land Rover and a trailer it was towing - which themselves had tumbled down an embankment and onto the tracks from a roadway above - then plowed into an oncoming freight train on a parallel track.
"The carriage roof was torn off and I was flung down the length of the corridor," said passenger Laurie Gunson of the northern city of York, one of dozens of dazed survivors of yesterday's crash outside the village of Great Heck, about 200 miles north of London.
Rescuers were met with a chaotic scene. Sheared-off undercarriages and mangled rail cars were strewn across a muddy field, and crews had to use cranes to pry open the twisted cars. Coal carried by the freight train was scattered about in heaps.
The last survivor was pulled out five hours after the early-morning crash, but as night fell, bodies were still being retrieved from the wreckage, and police said the death toll could rise.
Work crews brought in generators and lights to work through the freezing night. The smell of diesel fuel hung in the air.
"It is a tremendous tragedy, and a huge mess," said Police Superintendent Tony Thompson. It could take weeks to reopen the rail line, he said.
Prime Minister Tony Blair promised lawmakers "the fullest possible inquiry" into the crash, Britain's fourth fatal train wreck in 3 1/2 years and the latest blow to its troubled rail system.
After a full day, it was still not certain how many people had been on the train. Thompson, the police superintendent, said 144 passengers had booked tickets, but there could have been more, or fewer actually aboard.
Police said the driver of the Land Rover had called Britain's equivalent of 911 just before the crash. "While the operator was speaking to him we heard him shout: 'The train's coming!' and then there was a bang," a police spokesman said.
The driver, who was not identified, was being interviewed by police. "He's completely devastated knowing what happened as a result of his vehicle going onto the tracks," said Thompson.
Investigators were photographing the wreckage from all angles, and searching for a data recorder that had been aboard the freight train. They were also checking the condition of guardrails on the M62 highway above, from which the Land Rover plunged.
"We believe there were crash barriers in the area and our examiners will look at all aspects of this incident," said Detective Superintendent Nick Bracken of British Transport Police.
Carole Hutchinson, 45, who works near the crash site, said the weather was bitter yesterday morning.
"It was snowing badly, although it wasn't settling, it was heavy and not far off a blizzard."
Someone had placed a bouquet of daffodils, wrapped in pink paper, on the brick-and-stone bridge above the tracks.
Passengers described screaming and shouting as the passenger train, traveling at 120 mph, careened off the tracks and the lights went out.
"I held onto the table in front of me and then there was a huge impact. My carriage was on its side," said 22-year-old student Janine Edwards. "The man opposite me was streaming with blood. The window next to him was smashed and the frame had come out and hit him. His wife sitting next to him was covered in his blood."
At the crash site, the passenger train's engine was pointing into the air, jackknifed at a 45-degree angle. The freight train was partially derailed, with its front end completely off the track and lying on its side. It had slid into the back garden of a house.
The track is part of the east coast mainline from London to Edinburgh in Scotland. Four people were killed on that line at Hatfield, 25 miles north of London, on Oct. 17 when a rail broke and a passenger train derailed.
That accident led to speed restrictions and disruption throughout Britain's rail network during an emergency program of replacing cracked rails.
The railway confirmed that one of the locomotives involved in yesterday's crash had also been one of the two locomotives on the train that crashed at Hatfield.
