Train derailment was Australia's worst in 26 years

WATERFALL, Australia - A rush-hour commuter train derailed in rugged Australian bushland south of Sydney and slammed into an embankment on Friday, killing nine people and trapping some passengers for hours, police said.

Fifteen people were seriously injured in the country's worst train disaster in 26 years.

With no road access to the area, emergency crews had to trek 1.5 km (one mile) along dirt trails to reach the mangled train in a ravine near Waterfall, about 40 km (25 miles) south of Sydney.

They found a scene of bloody mayhem and hysteria, with up to 16 passengers trapped in the twisted wreckage.

"There are bodies and body parts on the ground," police spokesman Ross Neilson told reporters at the scene.

It took rescuers more than three hours to free all the passengers from the four-carriage, double-decker train with police using rocks to smash into two overturned carriages.

The cause of the accident was unknown but passenger Nonee Walsh, who suffered a suspected fractured shoulder, said the train had appeared to speed up before it derailed.

"I may have been dozing but.
.
.
the train seemed to just suddenly speed up to the point that the people in my carriage kind of looked up in alarm," she told Australian radio.

"Then it appeared to hit a corner.
There was a loud bang and we went over (and) my carriage lay on its side.
"

ZIG-ZAGGED ACROSS THE TRACKS

A Reuters photographer said it appeared the train had derailed, jumped over the opposite track and slammed into a sandstone embankment, dragging power lines and cables with it.

The driver's compartment was crushed and the first and third carriages had flipped over.

The derailed train was lying zig-zagged across the track as people covered in blood and wrapped in bandages were carried away on stretchers, with 39 people taken to hospital.

A spokeswoman for the operator City Rail, Heather Gilmore, said about 70 people were aboard the train travelling southward from Sydney to Port Kembla near Wollongong on the south coast when it derailed at about 0730 hours (2030 GMT Thursday).

Some of these passengers were on their way to work.
Others were students travelling to register at Wollongong University.

"Nine people are now confirmed dead and 15 seriously injured," a City Rail spokeswoman told Reuters.

The driver was believed to be among the dead, Gilmore said.

Anouska Zehalko, a 21-year-old passenger on her way to work in Wollongong, said there were "injured and dead everywhere".

"People were yelling, screaming, asking for help," she told Sky TV.
"Some people had a lot of cuts.
Some weren't so lucky.

"It all happened so quickly.
.
.
I'm still in state of shock and a lot of pain," said Zehalko, who suffered badly bruised legs.

Rescue efforts were hampered by the remoteness of the site.

Helicopters winched doctors down to the area while emergency crews erected shelters with large sheets of blue tarpaulin alongside the track to shield the injured from the sun.

Gilmore said it was too early to comment on suggestions that the heatwave of recent days, with temperatures soaring above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), had buckled the track.

But the fact at least

three trains had used the same line earlier in the day appeared to discount that theory.

New South Wales Premier Bob Carr announced three investigations into the incident -- by a judge, the coroner and a rail safety group -- after describing the site as traumatic.

"I saw the book one of them had been reading, papers that they'd been reading, their lives snatched from them in these circumstances," Carr told reporters.

The carriages were to be removed from the crash site over the weekend and reconstructed to help determine what happened.

Australia's worst rail disaster occurred at Granville in Sydney's west in January 1977 when 83 people were killed as a packed peak-hour train derailed and hit a concrete bridge.