Rail Death Toll Up to 42 in Japan

The toll in a train collision in western Japan grew to 42 dead and 402 injured Tuesday. It was the nation’s deadliest railway accident in 28 years.

The last body inside the crushed train cars was removed early today after a 14-hour rescue effort following the 10:35 a.m. head-on collision of a tourist train and a local train near the town of Shigaraki, 230 miles west of Tokyo, police said.

Most of the approximately 500 passengers on the three-car tourist train were traveling to a world pottery festival in Shigaraki, a police officer said. The four-car local train was carrying about 100 passengers.

The cause of the crash was unknown, he said. But local railway officials said that a failure in a signaling device might have been responsible.

The trains were to have passed each other 1 1/2 miles from the crash site on a siding built especially for the festival trains. But because the signal apparently failed, the local train left Shigaraki 10 minutes late and the special train did not wait at the siding.

The accident was Japan’s worst railway disaster since November, 1963, when 161 people were killed in the crash of two passenger trains in Yokohama, just south of Tokyo.