Train crash in South Africa injures around 80

USPA News - Approximately 80 people were injured on Tuesday evening when two passenger trains collided near a train station in the South African coastal city of Durban, emergency services said Wednesday. Serious accidents occur regularly on the country`s ageing rail network.

The accident happened early Tuesday evening just outside the Berea Road railway station in Durban, the largest city in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal. It occurred when a passenger train crashed into the back of a second train that was waiting for a red light outside the station. "Paramedics the fire department and several other services arrived at the scene and found the injured clambering from the train," said Chris Botha, a spokesman for ambulance service Netcare 911. "After they were stabilized at the scene, paramedics transported them to various hospitals for the care that they required. Botha said at least 69 people were injured, some of them seriously, but ambulance service ER 24 put the total number of injured at around 80. "The figure is a ballpark figure for the total number of patients on scene including those attended to by other emergency services on scene," ER 24 spokeswoman Luyanda Majija said. Rail system operator Metrorail said it was working with investigators to determine the cause of the collision. Tuesday`s accident comes less than a year after two passenger trains collided at nearly the same place, just outside Berea Road railway station. In that accident, which happened in December 2013, a train entered a junction where two tracks merge, causing it to collide with another train that was already occupying the other track. Twelve people were injured, one of them critically so. Serious accidents occur regularly on South Africa`s ageing rail network, in part because the vast majority of trains date back to the 1950s. The most serious train accident in recent years happened in May 2011 when two trains collided in Johannesburg, injuring 857 people, three of them seriously.