Train derails in Hunan; 1 killed, 127 hurt

One person died and 127 were injured after a passenger train derailed in Chenzhou, Hunan province, at around 11:40 am on Monday, the Chenzhou government said.

Authorities are looking into the cause of the accident, it said.

An initial investigation showed that the train derailed after it ran into a landslide caused by days of rainfall, according to the China Railway Guangzhou Group.

The group－part of the China State Railway Group, the country's top railway operator－said on its Sina Weibo account that the second to sixth carriages of the train, which was headed from Jinan, Shandong province, to Guangzhou, Guangdong province, derailed while a fire broke out in the first carriage. The fire was put out, the group added.

The 127 people who were injured included passengers and railway staff, including four who were seriously hurt. They have all been sent to hospitals, the group said.

The group said in another post that railway authorities have arranged for passengers who were uninjured to take high-speed trains to their destination.

The derailment happened on the Beijing-Guangzhou Railway, one of the busiest rail routes in the country. Thirty-one trains were delayed and rerouted by 1:30 pm on Monday, according to Xinhua News Agency.

Twenty-eight fire trucks and 147 firefighters were sent to take part in the rescue effort, the Ministry of Emergency Management said.

"I just came back from death," a passenger wrote in a Sina Weibo post, "People were laughing and talking, and suddenly the train derailed," the passenger was quoted by Beijing News as saying.

The passenger posted pictures of his train ticket and injured hand.

Another passenger, surnamed Jiang, told the newspaper that he passed out after the incident and was sent to the hospital.

A similar deadly derailment occurred around this time a year ago. Six people died after a company self-supply train carrying aluminum ore derailed in Henan province in April last year.

The train, owned by a branch of the logistics subsidiary of Aluminum Corporation of China, hit a village house in the city of Gongyi due to a brake failure, killing four crew members and two farmers.