Second Train Derailment In Japan

Japan is being shaken by two derailments in two days. Tuesday, a passenger train hit a truck at a crossing in Nimori, 50 miles northeast of Tokyo, and then jumped the tracks.

Police say the truck was stuck at the railroad crossing after one of its wheels came off, and the truck driver pulled an emergency alarm to warn the train, but the train was unable to stop in time. It crashed into the truck and then derailed.

The truck driver is reported to have suffered minor injuries.

The crash in Nimori, in Ibaraki Prefecture, came a day after a derailment in Amagasaki - just north of Osaka - which is the worst train accident in Japan in nearly 42 years.

The Japan Railways commuter train jumped the tracks in Amagasaki at 9:18 a.m. Monday and rammed into an apartment complex, killing at least 73 people and injuring at least 440 others, including 137 with broken bones and other serious injuries.

Tuesday, rescuers were finally able to pull out the last survivors from the gnarled wreckage of the train. Police say there are bodies still inside the debris at the crash site, indicating that the death toll of 73 people could go higher.

Investigators focused on excessive speed and a 23-year-old train driver's lack of experience after the crowded commuter train jumped the rails Monday on a curve and plowed into the apartment building just a few yards from the tracks.

Rescuers - including Self-Defense Force soldiers - worked into the night trying to free survivors from twisted rail carriages left when the train hit the nine-story building's parking garage.

Late Monday, rescuers trained floodlights on the damaged cars and administered emergency medical care to three conscious survivors, but were hampered by worries about a gasoline leak. Others were also inside but they were feared dead.

Distraught relatives rushed to hospitals 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 those still inside the wreckage.

The investigation is initially focusing on whether the driver of the train, 23-year-old Ryujiro Takami, who has been on the job less than a year, was speeding. Train drivers in Japan are under intense pressure to get to the stations exactly on time, and this train, reports CBS News Correspondent Barry Petersen, was running late.

Takami had overshot the stop line at the last station before the accident.

A month after receiving his license, in May 2004, Takami reportedly made a similar mistake, and was issued a warning at that time.

The tracks do have safety equipment that will slow the trains down even if the driver does not, but in this case the equipment was not working.

The place where the train derailed is one of the oldest tracks in Japan.

The seven-car commuter train was carrying 580 passengers when it derailed, wrecking an automobile in its path before slamming into a nine-story apartment complex just yards away. Two of the five derailed cars were flattened against the wall of the building, and hundreds of rescue workers and police swarmed the wreckage and tended to the injured.

"There was a violent shaking, and the next moment I was thrown to the floor ... and I landed on top of a pile of other people," passenger Tatsuya Akashi told NHK. "I didn't know what happened, and there were many people bleeding."

Japan - home to one of the world's most complex and heavily traveled rail networks - has not had a train accident of this magnitude since 1963, when a three-train crash killed 161 people in Tsurumi, outside Tokyo.

Transport Minister Kazuo Kitagawa has ordered all of Japan's railway operators to conduct safety inspections in the coming days.

"It's tragic," Kitagawa said at the scene. "We have to investigate why this horrible accident happened."

Survivors said the force of the derailment sent passengers tumbling through the inside of the cars. Photos taken by an NHK reporter aboard the train showed passengers piled on the floor and some clawing to escape from the busted shells of the cars. The derailed train cars had smashed into the first-floor parking garage of the apartment complex, NHK said.

Investigators struggled to come up with reasons for the crash. Tsunemi Murakami, Japan Railways' safety director, estimated that the train would have had to have been going 82 mph to have jumped the track purely because of excessive speed.

He said it still was not certain how fast the train was running at the time of the accident. The crash happened at a curve after a straightaway, requiring the driver to slow to a speed of 43 mph, Murakami said.

Experts also 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 traveling at a high speed. I would say it was going 50 kph (31 mph) above the speed limit," Kazuhiko Nagase, a Kanazawa Institute of Technology professor and train expert, told NHK.

NHK reported that the automatic braking system at that stretch of track is among the oldest in Japan. The system stops trains at signs of trouble without requiring drivers to take emergency action, but the older system is less effective in halting trains traveling at high speeds, NHK said.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi offered condolences to families of passengers who were killed, as did Emperor Akihito, in rare unscripted remarks at a news conference before an overseas goodwill trip.

Deadly train accidents are rare in Japan. Five people were killed and 33 were injured in March 2000, when a Tokyo subway hit a derailed train. An accident killed 42 people in April 1991 in Shigaraki, western Japan.