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There were about 480 passengers on board the eight-car train. 146 people were injured and taken to hospital, according to the Taiwan Railways.
Rescue teams at the scene worked for a long time to board several heavily damaged and inaccessible wagons inside the tunnel, where many people were trapped. The other four carriages of the train were outside the tunnel.
Some of the train cars had collided with the tunnel wall, Reuters reports. Passengers in some of the undamaged carriages were able to leave unscathed.
It is supposed to have slipped
The accident was caused by a truck that fell off a cliff onto the railroad and landed on the railroad track. The train was about to exit a tunnel and collided with the vehicle.
The truck driver had not applied the parking brake hard enough and therefore the car slid down the incline and ended up on the train tracks.
– Our train crashed into a truck, says a man in a video recording on Taiwanese television, where images of the crash site were shown.
– The truck fell, the men say.
On the way to the festival
The accident occurred while the train was heading from Taipei to Taitung, near Hualien, on the east coast of Taiwan, at 9:30 a.m. local time. The train was packed with people to celebrate a four-day festival.
A French citizen is among the dead, while two Japanese and a Macau person were injured.
“I felt like there had been a sudden shock, and I was on the ground,” one survivor told UDN, according to the BBC.
One woman spoke of many passengers trapped under the seats in the wrecked carriages. Many screamed for help, but others were unconscious.
Want an investigation
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen visited survivors in hospitals and made it clear that authorities will find out how such an accident could have occurred.
There have been several serious rail accidents in Taiwan over the years. The last big event happened in October 2018 when 18 people lost their lives.
In 1991, 30 people were killed and 112 injured when two trains collided, and ten years earlier, 30 had also died when a train collided with a truck. But the most serious was in 1948 when 64 people lost their lives.
