A passenger and a freight train crashed head-on at a Ukrainian rail station on Sunday, killing one person and derailing both trains, according to a Ministry of Transport statement, according to DPA. The accident took place at rural switching station in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region. The victim was a railroad worker. There were no other injuries.
The collision came after a passenger train entered a section of track where a 39-car freight train loaded with coal was heading in the opposite direction, according to a preliminary investigations.
Three coal cars were derailed, and one overturned as well, as a result of the crash.
Both locomotives of the passenger train, an overnight express from the Crimean port city Sevastpol to Kiev, left their rails as well.
Traffic running in both directions through the station - a major transportation artery linking east Ukraine with points westward - was delayed by as much as six hours.
It was not clear whether a stop light designed to prevent such an accident, and that the passenger train`s engineer should have seen, was working at the time of the accident, investigators said.
