(Prague) At least four people were killed and dozens injured in a collision between a passenger train and a goods convoy on Wednesday evening in the central Czech Republic, according to emergency services.
“Four passengers suffered injuries that led to their deaths,” ALENA Kisiala, a spokeswoman for local rescue services, told Czech public television.
Calling it “a great disaster,” Prime Minister Petr Fiala offered his condolences. “We are all thinking of the victims and the injured,” he wrote on the social network X.
According to public television, the accident happened shortly before 5 p.m. Eastern time near Pardubice train station, about 100 km east of Prague.
About 300 passengers, many of them foreigners, were on the train, she said, showing images of a derailed carriage and survivors boarding buses near Pardubice’s main station.
“The rescue work was complicated because the first wagon was deformed. This made it difficult to access the injured,” firefighter Pavel Ber told reporters at the scene.
Around sixty firefighters, two helicopters and nine ambulances were mobilized, according to the emergency services.
Arriving at the scene around 7 p.m. ET along with Transport Minister Vit Rakusan, Interior Minister Vit Rakusan said most of the injured suffered minor injuries, and the uninjured passengers were temporarily housed in Pardubice station.
According to official timetables, the train departed from Prague on Wednesday at 3:52 p.m. Eastern Time and was scheduled to leave Pardubice at 4:47 p.m. Eastern Time. He was expected in Chop at 4:35 a.m. ET on Thursday after crossing Slovakia from west to east.
The freight train was carrying calcium carbide, fire department spokeswoman Vendula Horakova told public television. It is an industrial product used to make acetylene, a hydrocarbon often used as a welding fuel.
The main railway line linking Prague to Brno and Ostrava, the country’s second and third cities respectively, will remain closed for several hours, Transport Minister Martin Kupka said.
An investigation is underway into the cause of the accident, he said.
Pardubice was the scene of the worst railway accident in the country’s history, in 1960: 118 people died and around a hundred injured in a head-on collision between two passenger trains north of the town.