A Dutch passenger train derailed after smashing into a crane early today, killing a maintenance worker and injuring 30 other people in the Netherlands' worst rail accident for years.
The double-decker train carrying around 50 people from Leiden to The Hague veered off the tracks near the village of Voorschoten at around 3:30am local time, before ending up partly in a field.
The Dutch infrastructure minister said it was a "miracle" that more people had not been killed in the crash, in which a freight train also hit the crane as it made overnight repairs on two out of four tracks.
Dutch monarch King Willem-Alexander later visited the site of the crash, where one of the damaged yellow and blue passenger carriages lay in a meadow while the three others were strewn across the rails.
People living near the scene, around eight kms (five miles) north of The Hague, helped the victims and let medics treat the injured in their homes.
The dead victim was an employee of rail maintenance company BAM, the firm said.
Thirty people were injured, with 19 taken to hospital and 11 treated at the scene, emergency services confirmed.
Dutch police and prosecutors said they had launched a criminal investigation, while rail authorities and the country's safety board are probing the cause of the crash.
The head of the rail network company ProRail, John Voppen, said it was a "black day for the Dutch railways".
Maintenance work involving the crane was under way when the crash happened, with two out of four tracks in the area being out of use.
"We really don't know what happened," Mr Voppen told a press conference.
The head of Dutch train operator NS, Wouter Koolmees, said the "devastation is very big". The driver of the passenger train was in hospital with bone fractures, he added.
Emergency services described a "chaotic situation" with rescue workers having to use wooden boards to get across a narrow canal, while watching for danger from damaged electrical cables.
Video taken by one passenger showed people using mobile phone torch-lights as they tried to smash their way through emergency exits, while voices can be heard shouting "leave the train".
King Willem-Alexander, wearing an orange high-visibility vest, spoke to emergency workers and walked along the tracks when he visited the scene.
"I'm just speechless right now seeing this," he said.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte described it as a "terrible train accident" in a post on Twitter.
The accident was the most serious in the Netherlands for years, according to public broadcaster NOS.
The Netherlands' worst train disaster happened on 8 January 1962 when two passenger trains crashed after a driver missed a signal in thick fog at Harmelen, near the central city of Utrecht, killing 93 people and injuring 52 others.
One person was killed and six others were injured when a train collided with a hydraulic crane in central Netherlands in 2016.
Another person died and 117 others were injured in a collision near Amsterdam in 2012 with reports later saying a driver failed to respect a stop sign.
