Excessive speed 'may be behind Australian crash'

Speculation grew today that excessive speed caused an Australian commuter train to derail, killing eight.

The train, carrying about 70 passengers, jumped off the tracks in a ravine outside Sydney during morning rush hour yesterday, killing eight, seriously injuring 23 and trapping others in the wreckage,

All four of the train’s carriages lay crumpled or toppled along the tracks.

Police said the earlier estimate of nine killed was “the result of extraordinary difficulties with disaster victim identification at the scene”.

No more victims were likely to be found at the scene, police said.

The New South Wales state government has appointed an independent judicial inquiry into the cause of the accident.

But the investigation received its first setback today when Transport Minister Carl Scully said that the black box retrieved from the train had not been working.

“There is no useful information on it and it was not operational,” Scully told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.

He would not comment on the growing speculation that speed may have been the cause of the crash.

The newspaper Sydney Morning Herald reported today that a passenger in the second carriage, Krstana Eftimovski, had turned to a friend soon after the train left Waterfall station and said: “I don’t know how we are going to make it alive. We’re going too fast.”

Nonee Walsh, an Australian Broadcasting Corporation reporter who suffered a suspected fractured shoulder in the crash, said the train appeared to accelerate just before derailing.

“I may have been dozing but just south of Waterfall, the train seemed to just suddenly speed up to the point that the people in my carriage kind of looked up in alarm,” she said.

Rescue workers said the train was probably travelling at about 50mph when it crashed, even though it was in a 30mph zone.

Authorities refused to comment on the speculation, saying that was the job of the inquiry.

It was Australia’s worst train smash since January 1977, when a train crashed in Granville, western Sydney, killing 83.