36 Killed, 110 Hurt as British Trains Collide

LONDON — A standing-room-only, long-distance commuter train slammed into the rear of a second crowded passenger train at the height of the Monday morning rush hour, killing at least 36 people and injuring 110 others in one of the worst rail disasters in postwar British history.

More than 30 of the survivors were in critical condition, and wreckage was still being removed late Monday night. Rescue workers said they might not know until early this morning if any more bodies lay hidden in the twisted metal.

The overall toll is in excess of the casualties from a disastrous London subway fire at the King’s Cross station in November, 1987. Transportation Secretary Paul Channon called it “a very major and tragic disaster.”

Rescuers Use Special Tools

An estimated 150 firefighters and other rescue personnel worked for more than five hours with special cutting tools to free broken and bleeding passengers trapped in the seats and corridors of grotesquely crumpled railway cars.

“Sheer bloody hell!” is how one fire brigade spokesman described the scene.

In at least two cases, medical teams had to amputate limbs to free trapped commuters. Other victims were impaled by jagged pieces of metal.

“There was just an almighty bang, and people everywhere,” said a dazed survivor. His train, he added, had been full. “It always is.”

Soon after the crash, a third, nearly empty train headed in the opposite direction plowed into the wreckage. But officials said the bulk of the casualties resulted from the initial collision.

The accident occurred as the commuter trains neared Clapham Junction in south London, the busiest rail interchange in all Britain and reputedly one of the most heavily used in the world. An average of 2,200 trains a day pass through the junction--one every 39 seconds.

Officials said the lead train, from Basingstoke, about 60 miles southeast of London, was stopped at a red trackside signal when the following train, from Poole, on the English Channel near Bournemouth, crashed into it at an estimated speed of 40 to 50 miles per hour. The accident occurred shortly after 8 a.m.--the height of the morning rush hour.

The state-owned British Rail Corp. accepted “full responsibility” for the disaster and said that a preliminary investigation suggests there was a “technical fault” relating to a continuing effort to modernize the signaling system in the area.

As the Basingstoke train slowed, the Poole train should have immediately been alerted to slow down or stop completely by an automatic and supposedly fail-safe signal light system. The signaling equipment in the area is as much as 50 years old, however, and some temporary signals are in use during the modernization effort.

Engineer Among Dead

The engineer of the Poole train was one of those killed in the accident, a factor that is expected to complicate a promised full public inquiry. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said the investigation begun immediately by British Rail would not be enough.

Thatcher, who had encouraged an unprecedented public and private British aid effort to comfort earthquake victims in Soviet Armenia over the last few days, called Monday for the nation to console those affected by Britain’s own disaster.

“What has happened would be a tragedy for them anyway, at any time,” she said. “It is even more poignant at Christmas, and we just have to do everything we can to help and comfort them in their deep sorrow.”

Chris Webb, a spokesman for the city ambulance service, who was among the first on the scene, described it as “absolutely horrendous,” and added: “There were pieces of bodies lying all over the place. You could hear people moaning. I was at King’s Cross, and I would say that this is on a par with it or maybe even worse.”

Thirty-one people died and 50 were injured in the subway fire 13 months ago.

It took more than five hours to free the last of the survivors of Monday’s crash, according to Assistant Chief Officer Jim McMillan, who coordinated the fire brigade rescue services. And it wasn’t until early evening that rescuers reached the last of the bodies they knew were still in the wreckage.

Film broadcast on British television, some of which had been shot by rescue teams, showed workmen struggling in cramped spaces between shattered and derailed cars. Dazed survivors, many with their heads bleeding or bandaged, sat nearby wrapped in red blankets against the morning chill.

The most severely hurt were carried on stretchers over the roofs of tilting rail cars and up a steep embankment to a waiting fleet of more than 50 ambulances. Other shaken passengers made their own way to a nearby school that was used as a temporary emergency center.

“The whole of the buffet car disintegrated,” said survivor Chris Reeves, a 38-year-old engineer. “The roof split open like a ripe tomato, and that’s how we got out.”

Another survivor, Keith Larner, 36, of Southampton, said he regained consciousness with “people underneath me and people with metal in their bodies.”

Monday’s crash was the most deadly rail accident here--train or subway--since 1975, when 43 people died as a subway train slammed into a wall at London’s Moorgate station. In addition, the Clapham accident was the worst on the British Rail system since a 1969 south London collision in which 49 people died. The London subway is run separately and is not part of the British Rail system.

Before the Clapham tragedy, there had been only 35 people killed in British Rail accidents during the last nine years, according to a railroad spokesman. Three of those years had been free of fatalities.

However, Monday’s was the third crash on the system this month. And critics charged that overcrowding and inadequate government spending to maintain its equipment was making the system increasingly dangerous.

The worst rail crash in British history occurred May, 1915, when 227 people were killed and 246 injured in a collision in Scotland. In two major postwar rail accidents, 112 died and 340 were injured in a three-train collision north of London in 1952, and 90 were killed and 109 seriously injured in a December, 1957, crash southeast of the capital.

Monday’s accident brought British Rail service to and from the heavily populated southeast of the country to a virtual halt. Since British Rail serves in part to feed commuters onto the London subway system and shares some stations with it, the accident also disrupted underground schedules on certain lines.

A British Rail spokesman warned that rail travelers could face serious delays for several days. “It is going to be horrendous,” he said. “Until engineers can tell us the extent of the damage, nothing can go through Clapham.”