Human error now is the main line of inquiry.
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Two officials in charge of railway stations in southern Italy where a train crash killed 23 people have been placed under investigation as magistrates seek to determine the cause of the collision, a judicial source said.
It is still unclear whether the accident was due to human error or a technical problem on a stretch of track where safety is dependent on telephone calls rather than computer systems.
Pope Francis has expressed his grief over yesterday’s train collision which killed 23 people in the southern Italian region of Puglia.
Newspaper reports said the trains were travelling at high speed towards each other on a single track when they collided.
The rail line north of Bari relies on an antiquated phone alert system dating back to the 1960s, in common with some 600km (370 miles) of regional track elsewhere in Italy, the government says.
“Surely one of the two trains shouldn’t have been there”, Conticchio said. Both trains were made up of four carriages.
One of the drivers was confirmed dead, with rescue workers recovering a hand and a leg from the mangled mess of his cabin. Most passengers had no warning of the coming crash.
Passengers described being thrown violently forward at the moment of impact, and then trying to free themselves from the tangle of metal, body parts and debris in the scorching midday sun. I saw my mother on the ground, my father and my sister bleeding. “We will look for all the people responsible, including those who are responsible in different ways”. The collision happened around 11:30 a.m. local time on Tuesday while the trains were moving through an olive grove between the towns of Corato and Ruvo di Puglia, the New York Times reported.
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After visiting the crash site, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi declared it an “absurd” tragedy and vowed to investigate fully.
