China train undergoes massive rehab

HANGSHA: Railway repair is well underway after a train derailed in the city of Chenzhou in central China’s Hunan Province Friday last week.

The accident happened in Yongxing County at 11:40 a.m. when the train ran into a landslide, leaving five carriages derailed. The power generation car caught on fire. One passenger and 127 others were wounded in the incident.

The fire had been put out and all of the injured had been sent to hospital, with four in serious condition, local authorities said.

There were 691 people aboard the train when the derailment occurred, rescuers said. Except for those injured that were sent to hospital, other passengers took shelter in a nearby primary school until buses were sent to deliver them to a high-speed railway station.

“We volunteered to cook noodles and dress the wounds of several hundred passengers in the school until they were picked up,” said Liu Guijiao, a local villager.

He Zhiwen from China Railway Guangzhou Group told Xinhua that about 380 meters of tracks need repair. The engineering department has prepared 450 meters of tracks and 1,600 railroad ties.

Carriages will be removed after the repairs are completed, but the time for the traffic to resume has not been decided yet.

He said over 1,000 workers had been sent along with seven excavators, six railcars, two large tampers and three relief trains. “We will try our best to resume traffic as soon as possible,” said an engineer on site.

The train, T179, was running from the city of Jinan, east China’s Shandong Province, to Guangzhou in south China’s Guangdong Province.

The group said 88 trains on the southern section of the Beijing-Guangzhou railway had been affected, including 54 suspensions, 22 returns and 12 detours.