October 8, 1999
Web posted at: 11:17 a.m. EDT (1517 GMT)

From staff and wires reports

LONDON (CNN) -- A train leaving London passed a red danger signal before crossing in front of an inbound train, causing Britain's worst train accident in a decade or more, investigators said Friday.

The fiery wreck during Tuesday morning's rush hour in west London killed at least 30 people. Scores more are still unaccounted for.

"The immediate cause of the accident appears to be that the Thames Train passed a red signal some 700 meters (767 yards) before the collision point," said an initial report by the government-run Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

The HSE report said track controllers realized the outbound Thames Train had passed Signal 109, but were unable to stop the inbound First Great Western train before it struck the local commuter.

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The preliminary report did not place blame on the Thames Train driver. Drivers of both trains are presumed to have died in the crash.

Train drivers consider the Signal 109 one of the most dangerous on the British rail lines. Poor visibility, they said, has caused drivers to miss the light eight times in the past four years.

An automatic train protection (ATP) system installed at Signal 109 could have stopped the outbound train, the report said. Such a system was scheduled to be installed at Signal 109 by 2003, said Chief Inspector of Railways Vic Coleman.

An ATP system on the Great Western train was not working, but was unlikely to have had any bearing on the accident, the report said. ATP systems stop trains that have passed red signals; the inbound commuter had a green light.

The HSE has prohibited operation of Signal 109, and rerouted trains from that track, until the visibility problems are corrected. It has also ordered additional controls at 22 other signals with high red-light violations.

Authorities have identified 11 victims of Tuesday's crash, which occurred a few kilometers west of London's Paddington Station. But they are far from determining just how many people died.

A fireball roared through the front coaches of the Great Western train immediately after the impact, pushing temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,800 Fahrenheit).

One coach, inspectors said, is knee- to waist-deep in ash and believed to have held as many as 60 passengers. The coach was badly burned, however, forcing crews to take extraordinary measures to ensure the safety of the investigators.

Workers were building a scaffolding around the charred carriage to support a structure that will permit the investigators to move inside the fragile shell.

"They will actually be hanging from harnesses above the debris so they can conduct their search," said Superintendent Tony Thompson of the British Transport Police.

But authorities doubt that many identifiable human remains will be found in the carriage.

Among the victims identified so far were Anthony Beeton, 47, an adviser to Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam; Matthew McCauley, 26, a native of Auckland, New Zealand; Delroy Manning, 39, a plasterer from Jamaica; and Robert Cotton, 41, a school caretaker from Dursley in western England.

The confirmed death toll is sure to rise above that of a 1988 crash in South London that killed 35 people. Previously, a two-train collision in south London killed 92 in 1957, and a three-train crash in Harrow five years earlier killed 112.

Britain's worst train wreck came on May 22, 1915, killing 227 people in Scotland.

Correspondent Jim Bittermann, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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