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AMAGASAKI, Japan - A packed commuter train jumped the tracks in western Japan Monday morning and rammed into an apartment building, killing at least 54 people and injuring 417 in Japan's deadliest train accident in four decades. Investigators immediately focused on whether excessive speed or the actions of the inexperienced driver caused the crash in Amagasaki, an Osaka suburb about 250 miles west of Tokyo. The 23-year-old driver had to back up after overshooting the last station before the wreck, and a crew member and several passengers speculated the train was speeding to make up time. As darkness fell nearly nine hours after the accident, rescue workers toiling behind blue plastic sheeting were trying to retrieve at least three people believed to be alive in the wreckage embedded in the building’s first-floor car park. It was unclear what their conditions were. The fate of the driver was unknown. Rescuers in hard hats clustered near the twisted remains of the front two cars, one of which had been smashed to less than half its normal width, using cutters and ropes to get inside. The Amagasaki Fire Department said the death toll had hit 54, and a Hyogo prefectural (state) police official said at least 417 people had been taken to hospitals, among them 125 with broken bones and other serious injuries. 'Violent shaking' The seven-car commuter train was carrying 580 passengers when it derailed, wrecking an automobile in its path before slamming into the nine-story apartment complex. Two of the five derailed cars were flattened against the wall of the building, and hundreds of rescue workers and police swarmed the wreckage and tended to the injured. “There was a violent shaking, and the next moment I was thrown to the floor ... and I landed on top of a pile of other people,” passenger Tatsuya Akashi told NHK. “I didn’t know what happened, and there were many people bleeding.” A visibly shaken man in his 20s, his face bloodied, told NHK that “the train over-ran a stop at the previous station and so it backtracked. "So I guess the driver was in a hurry because the train was running late," he added. "The train was moving so fast, we hit a turn and I didn’t think we’d make it. Then the train derailed.” It was not clear how many of the dead were passengers or if bystanders or apartment residents were among the victims. The accident was the worst rail disaster in nearly 42 years in Japan, which is home to one of the world’s most complex and heavily traveled rail networks. A three-train crash in November 1963 killed 161 people in Tsurumi, outside Tokyo. The train operator apologized. “Our most important task now is to rescue the passengers from the accident and we are doing our best,” West Japan Railway Co. President Takeshi Kakiuchi told reporters. Passengers piled on floor Survivors said the force of the derailment sent passengers tumbling through the inside of the cars. Photos taken by an NHK reporter aboard the train showed passengers piled on the floor and some clawing to escape from the busted shells of the cars. Investigators struggled to come up with reasons for the crash. Tsunemi Murakami, the train operator’s safety director, estimated that the train would have had to have been going 82 mph to jump the track purely because of excessive speed. He said it still was not certain how fast the train was running at the time of the accident. The crash happened at a curve after a straightaway, requiring the driver to slow to a speed of 43 mph, Murakami said. NHK reported that the automatic braking system at that stretch of track is among the oldest in Japan. The system stops trains at signs of trouble without requiring drivers to take emergency action, but the older system is less effective in halting trains traveling at high speeds, NHK said. The driver’s inexperience may also have been a factor. He only had 11 months on the job. He had committed a previous overrun at a station in June 2004 and was issued a warning, officials said. Deadly train accidents are rare in Japan. Five people were killed and 33 were injured in March 2000, when a Tokyo subway hit a derailed train. An accident killed 42 people in April 1991 in Shigaraki, western Japan.
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