Four people died in Japan on Thursday after being hit by a train, authorities said, in a country renowned for its normally excellent rail safety record.<\/p>\n
The incident involving four workers took place at Shin-Kanuma Station north of Tokyo, the fire department said.<\/p>\n
“The four were confirmed dead,” a fire department official told AFP.<\/p>\n
Another official said that when emergency services arrived, three workers were trapped under the train, while one was on the platform.<\/p>\n
“Before being taken to hospital, all four of them were unconscious,” he told AFP.<\/p>\n
Kyodo News reported that the train was the Spacia X express on the Tobu Nikko Line, connecting Greater Tokyo with Nikko — a popular tourist destination.<\/p>\n
“We heard this loud rumbling noise. Then the train came to an emergency stop with such sudden braking that it was impossible to stand,” a 40-year-old man who was on the train told broadcaster NHK.<\/p>\n
“There was an announcement saying ‘we will stop to identify where the noise came from,’ and then we were left unable to get off for a while,” the man was quoted as saying.<\/p>\n
Emergency services were first called at 10:47 am (0147 GMT).<\/p>\n
Nippon TV reported that the workers were removing weeds from around the train track.<\/p>\n
Japanese railways have one of the best safety records in the world.<\/p>\n
Fatal accidents from collisions or derailments are extremely rare due to high levels of maintenance and training, and use of advanced technology.<\/p>\n
Japan’s deadliest rail accident this century was in April 2005 when a rush-hour commuter train derailed and smashed into an apartment building in Amagasaki.<\/p>\n
That tragedy in the Hyogo region of western Japan killed 107 people and injured more than 500 others.<\/p>\n
Another accident involving a derailed cargo train and two passenger trains killed 161 people in 1963.<\/p>\n
Famously though, there has never been a passenger fatality from a derailment or a collision on Japan’s network of “shinkansen” bullet trains since they entered service in 1964.<\/p>\n
AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Four people died in Japan on Thursday after being hit by a train, authorities said, in a country…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77266,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[212,12,1045,1049,1044,1053,1047,1046,1048,8,1051,1052,1050,1043,1042,52,257],"class_list":["post-77265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tokyo","tag-breaking-news","tag-china","tag-english-daily","tag-finance","tag-free-newspaper","tag-headlines","tag-hong-kong-media","tag-hong-kong-news","tag-hong-kong-news-media","tag-japan","tag-latest-news","tag-sing-tao","tag-sports","tag-standard","tag-the-standard","tag-tokyo","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}