Japanese investigate driver, speed in derailment

AMAGASAKI, Japan -- The death toll jumped to 73 Tuesday as crews pulled more victims from the wreckage of Japan's deadliest rail crash in decades. Investigators focused on whether excessive speed or the driver's inexperience caused the train to derail and slam into a building.

The seven-car commuter train carrying 580 passengers left the rails Monday morning near Amagasaki, a suburb of Osaka about 250 miles west of Tokyo. It hit an automobile and then a nine-story apartment complex. More than 440 people were injured.

Rescuers working under floodlights pulled out a conscious but seriously injured 46-year-old woman then reached a 19-year-old male passenger, also in serious condition.

But most of the work was grim as crews pulled 14 more bodies from the twisted rail carriages, pushing the death toll from 57 to 71.

Police said there a few other passengers were still trapped but no one was responding, an indication that there were no more survivors.

Two of the five derailed cars were shoved inside and flattened against the wall of the building's first-floor parking garage.

Distraught relatives rushed to hospitals looking for loved ones who might have been injured or killed in the 5:18 a.m. crash. They struggled to comprehend their loss.

"I only saw him the night before," said Hiroko Kuki, whose son died in the crash. "I wish he were alive somewhere."

Takamichi Hayashi said his elder brother, 19-year-old Hiroki, might be among those still in the wreck. He said Hiroki had called their mother twice on a mobile phone from inside one of the train cars hours after the crash but remained unaccounted for.

"He told my mother: 'I'm in pain. I'm not going to make it,"' Hayashi said.

Officials said no cause had been ruled out but added that investigators suspected speed and the driver's experience of less than a year.

The driver -- identified as Ryujiro Takami, 23 -- was unaccounted for.

He got his train operator's license last May. A month later, he overshot a station and was issued a warning, railway officials and police said. Passengers said he also stopped too far past a station platform just before the crash.

Tsunemi Murakami, safety director for train operator West Japan Railway Co., said it had not been determined how fast the train was traveling.

A surviving crew member told police he "felt the train was going faster than usual," public broadcaster NHK said.

That echoed comments from passengers who speculated the driver might have been speeding to make up for time lost when he overshot the previous station by 25 feet and had to back up. The train was nearly two minutes behind schedule, media reports said.

The crash occurred on a curve with a speed limit of 43 mph. Murakami estimated the train would have had to be traveling at 82 mph to have jumped the track purely because of excessive speed.

Some stretches of track in Japan have safety systems designed to stop trains at any sign of trouble without requiring drivers to take emergency action. But transport ministry officials said the automatic braking system along the stretch of track where the train crashed is among the oldest in Japan and can't halt trains traveling at high speeds.

Outside experts predicted investigators would find a combination of factors to blame.

"There are very few train accidents in Japan in which a train has flipped just because it was going too fast. There might have been several conditions at work -- speed, winds, poor train maintenance or aging rails," Kazuhiko Nagase, a train expert who is a professor at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology, told NHK.

"For the train to flip, it had to be traveling at an extremely high speed," Nagase said.

Murakami said investigators also found evidence of rocks on the tracks, but hadn't determined whether that contributed to the crash.

Transport Minister Kazuo Kitagawa told reporters he would order all of Japan's railway operators to conduct safety inspections in the coming days.

"It's tragic," Kitagawa said at the scene. "We have to investigate why this horrible accident happened."

Deadly train accidents are rare in Japan, which is home to one of the world's most complex, efficient and heavily traveled rail networks. Monday's crash was the worst since 161 people died in a three-train crash in 1963 at Tsurumi, outside Tokyo.