ionigeria.com Nigerian Newspaper
At least 36 people have died and more than 60 others have been injured after a train derailed in eastern Taiwan, officials have said.
The train, carrying around 490 people, is believed to have come off the rails in a tunnel just north of Hualien causing some carriages to hit the wall of the tunnel.
It is believed to have hit a truck that was “not parked properly” and is suspected to have slid onto the train tracks in the mountainous area, the official Central News Agency said.
Between 80 and 100 people have been evacuated from the first four carriages of the train, while carriages five to eight have “deformed” and are hard to gain access to, firefighters said.
About 70 people remain trapped in the wreckage and rescue efforts are ongoing, they added.
“Our train crashed into a truck,” one man said in a video aired on Taiwanese television, showing pictures of the wreckage. “The truck came falling down.”
The train is an express travelling from Taipei to Taitung carrying many tourists and people heading home at the start of a long weekend.
Images of the crash scene showed some carriages inside the tunnel crumbled and ripped apart from the impact.
With much of the train still trapped in the tunnel, escaping passengers were forced to scale doors, windows, and roofs to reach safety.
The fire department showed a picture of what appeared to be the truck’s wreckage lying next to the derailed train.
The accident happened at around 9 am local time (2 am BST) and came on the first day of the four-day Qingming Tomb Sweeping Festival.
Taiwan‘s last major rail crash was in 2018 when an express train derailed while negotiating a tight corner on the northeast coast, killing at least 18 people and injuring nearly 200.
In 1991, a collision in western Taiwan killed 30 people and injured 112.
