Passenger trains collide in South Africa, injuring 12

[News_Editor]

DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA (BNO NEWS) -- Two passenger trains collided Friday at a train station in the South African coastal city of Durban, injuring a dozen people, emergency services said. The exact cause was not immediately known, but serious accidents occur regularly on the country's ageing rail network.

The accident happened at approximately 8 a.m. local time on Friday just outside the Berea Road railway station in Durban, the largest city in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal. It occurred when one of the trains entered a junction where two tracks merge, causing it to collide with another train that was already occupying the other track.

Chris Botha, a spokesman for ambulance service Netcare 911, said eleven people were injured, including one man who was critically injured. A spokeswoman for the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) later said a total of twelve people had been injured, including both train drivers.

"Netcare 911 paramedics arrived at the scene and found that ten people had sustained moderate injuries while one man was in a critical condition. After the injured were stabilized they were transported to various hospitals for the care that they required," Botha said. The condition of the twelfth patient was not immediately known.

Serious accidents occur regularly on South Africa's ageing rail network, in part because the vast majority of trains date back to the 1950s. The most serious train accident in recent years happened in May 2011 when two trains collided in Johannesburg, injuring 857 people, three of them seriously.

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