The incident occurred at around 11.20am when trains ET1023 from Barletta Central to Bari Airport and ET1018 from Bari Airport to Barletta Central collided on a single-track section of the standard-gauge Bari – Barletta line between the towns of Corato and Andria.
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Massim Mazzilli, mayor of Corato, said in a Facebook post that parts were scattered over the pristine countryside, “as if an airplane fell”.
It is feared that the death toll may rise further in the coming days as severely wounded passengers succumb to their injuries.
“It was a terrifying scene, like a hallucination”, one rescue worker told La Repubblica.
Only five of the victims had identity documents on their person, the rest presumably in wallets or bags sent flying across carriages on impact, making it more hard for authorities to name the dead.
The civil protection agency said 25 bodies had been recovered and two people were still known to be missing.
The wreck happened in a relatively remote region.
An investigation is focusing on human error as the likely cause of the accident. “We won’t stop until we get a clear explanation over what happened”.
“We went around all the hospitals, all day”, said Giuseppe Colaleone, the brother-in-law of a passenger.
Delrio said of the 3,000 kilometers of regional secondary railways in Italy, a single track is used for 2,700 kilometers.
Several hours after the crash, passengers were still being pulled from the wreckage alive, the BBC reported.
Recovery operations using a giant crane and rescue dogs continued through the night and into Wednesday to remove the mangled debris of the two commuter trains that slammed into one another just before noon Tuesday in the neat olive groves of Puglia.
“The entire region is participating in this drama with huge blood donation”, Loreto Gesualdo, head of the school of medicine at the university of Bari, capital city of Puglia, said. “The misfortune was that the crash took place at a curve, and neither driver may have had the time to hit the brakes”.
The last major rail disaster in Italy was in 2009 when a freight train derailed in Viareggio, in the centre of the country, and more than 30 people living close to the tracks died in the subsequent fire. “A nurse said they have probably identified her”.
“Unfortunately, a system like this means the controls lie with humans”, leaving a window for human error, he said.
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Numerous passengers on one of the trains were students heading to lessons at the University of Bari and travellers on their way to Bari global airport.
