The early Monday train collision in east China's Shandong Province has caused 43 deaths and 247 injuries so far, railway authorities confirmed.
Among the injured passengers were four French nationals, all of whom have been hospitalized for bone fractures, a spokesman with the provincial foreign affairs office said.
He did not give the foreigners' names or identities.
Photo taken on April 28, 2008, shows the site of the trains colliding accident, in east China's Shandong Province. Passenger train T195 en route from Beijing to Qingdao city in eastern China derailed and hit train 5034 early on Monday, causing "heavy casualties", witnesses and a government spokesman confirmed. The casualties were from two passengers trains, one of which was en route from Beijing to Qingdao, a famous summer resort in Shandong and venue of the Olympic sailing competition, and the other, from Shandong's Yantai to Xuzhou in eastern Jiangsu Province.
The Jinan Railway Bureau based in Shandong said 51 of the injured people were in critical condition.
The train from Beijing, coded T195, derailed in the city of Zibo in Shandong Province at 4:43 a.m. About 10 carriages toppled into a ditch.
The derailed train hit train 5034 and caused the latter to veer off its tracks, too.
Many passengers climbed out the wrecked train cars shortly after the accident. Some wrapped up themselves in bed sheets from the sleeper cars in the early morning chill.
Xinhua reporters at the site saw blood-tainted sheets and broken thermos flasks on the ground, and some of the derailed train cars were seriously deformed.
A 38-year-old woman from the provincial capital Jinan escaped from the wrecked train from a huge crack on its floor with her 13-year-old daughter.
"We were still sleeping when the accident occurred," she said. "I suddenly woke up when I felt the train stopped with a jolt. In a minute or two it started off again, but soon toppled."
The woman, who gave only her family name as Yu, said she was traveling with her daughter from Yantai to Jinan on board train 5034. After the accident they were given bread and water and were waiting for treatment.
The mother said she suffered pains on her legs, but the child seemed largely unwounded.
The accident occurred in Hejiacun village, sandwiched between Zhoucun district and Wangcun railway station in the suburbs of Zibo, and about 70 kilometers east of the provincial capital Jinan.
Dozens of injured passengers were being treated at the Zhoucun People's Hospital. "Most are slight cases and more people are being sent in every hour," a hospital worker told Xinhua in a telephone interview. "Some of our medical workers have gone out for rescue work, too."
The hospital, about 30 minutes' drive from the site of the accident, is one of several hospitals involved in the rescue work.
Rescue teams, consisting medical workers and policemen, have been sent in from the neighboring cities of Jinan and Weifang, said a spokesman with the Shandong provincial government.
The accident has disrupted two-way traffic on the Jinan-Qingdao Railway, a pivotal provincial rail link.
This is the second major railway accidents taking place in Shandong this year.
In January, a high-speed train from Beijing to Qingdao ran downa group of railway workers in Shandong Province, leaving 18 dead and nine others injured.
The workers were relocating the tracks when the train ran into the work site in Anqiu City of Shandong.
Source: Xinhua
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