Japanese train death toll rises to 50

The death toll after today's Japanese train crash is now 50 and officials say the number of injured had increased to 417.

Distraught relatives rushed to hspitals to search lists of the injured and dead. Takamichi Hayashi said his elder brother, 19-year-old Hiroki, had called their mother on a mobile phone from inside one of the train cars just after the crash but remained unaccounted for. He said he had heard Hiroki was among the four trapped in the wreckage.

A crew member aboard told police later he “felt the train was going faster than usual,” NHK said, echoing comments from survivors interviewed by the network who speculated that the driver was attempting to make up for lost time after overrunning a stop line at the previous station.

Experts suspected speed was to blame.

“If the train hadn’t hit anything before derailing … the train was probably speeding. For the train to flip, it had to be travelling at a high speed,” Kazuhiko Nagase, a Kanazawa Institute of Technology professor and train expert, told NHK.

Tokyo dispatched Self-Defence Force soldiers to the disaster scene to assist. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi offered condolences to families of passengers who were killed, as did Emperor Akihito, in unusual unscripted remarks.

Koizumi pledged that officials would do everything they could to prevent a recurrence of the crash.

“It’s tragic,” Transport Minister Kazuo Kitagawa said at the scene. “We have to investigate why this horrible accident happened.”