Austria has declared a state of national mourning after at least 150 people were killed when a train packed with skiers caught fire in a tunnel on its way to a glacier resort in the Alps. The blaze gutted the train in the tunne, which runs through the Kitzsteinhorn mountain, south west of the city of Salzburg. Eight people are reported to have survived by crawling out of a window to escape the flames.
Police said that three people in a station at the top of the railway were also killed by poisonous fumes. The dead are believed to include Austrians, Germans, Britons and Americans. An Austrian government spokesman said the fire was possibly caused by a technical fault.
The disaster is believed to be the worst ever in a country which has seen more than its fair share of fatal avalanches and mountain tragedies. "There are at least 150 dead, certainly primarily young people, who perhaps decided early today on the spur of the moment to do some winter sports," Salzburg provincial governor Franz Schausberger told Germany's NTV television.
The single-carriage train could carry up to 180 people and is believed to have been full. Mr Schausberger said earlier only eight people were thought to have survived the terrifying blaze, implying as many as 172 dead. But a hospital in nearby Zell am See said it had treated 18 survivors who had apparently escaped the inferno, three of whom had already been discharged.
There is no confirmation of the nationality of the victims, who had come to the popular Kaprun area to take advantage of beautiful autumn weather and what were described as perfect conditions for skiing. "I did not realise the full extent of the catastrophe until two railway workers came directly from the tunnel and told us all they had found was the metal base of the train," Mr Schausberger told Austria's ORF radio. "Everything else was burned out. We had to deduce the sad news that probably none of the passengers survived."
A local Red Cross official, Gerhard Huber, said that police were setting up checkpoints so they could establish the identity of people leaving the area in order to work out who was missing. "Now it is just a question of recovering and identifying the bodies," he said.
The fire is believed to have started at the lower end of the single-carriage train soon after it began its ascent up the 45-degree incline. Those who escaped were at the bottom end of the vehicle. They managed to break windows and free themselves. But the remaining passengers are likely to have been quickly engulfed by fire or overcome by deadly smoke as the blaze raced upwards.
Experts are puzzled by the cause of the fire as the train, which is drawn up the mountain by a five-cm thick cable powered by engines at the top, did not have an engine or on-board power source. It was also furnished with materials that were supposed to be fire-proof. The Kitzsteinhorn railway, built in 1974, was initially described as the world's first underground mountain railway because almost all of it went through the mountain. It is some four km long, rising from the valley which is 900 metres above sea-level to the mountain station at 2,400 metres. The normal journey time is around nine minutes.
The mayor of Kaprun, Norbert Karlsboeck, said that the fire had started at around 8.00am GMT when the train, which was heading up the mountain, had travelled about 600 metres into the 3,200-metre tunnel. "The train is still burning," he said four hours later, adding that smoke was billowing out of the end of the tunnel on the mountain top. He said that the train had a capacity of 180, adding: "It was probably full because it was a beautiful day for skiing."
Mr Karlsboeck said that there was no information about the cause of the blaze. One of the train's cables had snapped, but it was not the main cable used to haul the vehicle up the mountain and the damage may have occurred during the blaze. Engineer Klaus Eisenkolb, who had inspected the train in the past, said that he could not understand how it had caught fire. It was fitted with safety systems to bring the vehicle to an immediate halt if one of the cables snapped, he said. "It is not supposed to burn because the materials used are fire-resistant," he added.
Thirteen helicopters were at the scene and police asked motorists to avoid roads in the area to keep them clear for rescue vehicles. Last year, around 40 people died in an inferno in the Mont Blanc road tunnel between France and Italy that started when a truck caught fire and in Austria, 12 people were killed in a fire in the Tauern road tunnel under the Alps. In June, at least 64 people were injured when two trains collided near Germany's highest mountain, the Zugspitze.
