- Two East Midlands Railway trains collided south of Bedford in a train accident north of London on Friday afternoon.
- One person died and over 80 were injured, some seriously.
- Eyewitnesses reported seeing passengers thrown from their seats.
One person has died in a collision between two trains north of London. 89 people were injured, 33 of them seriously to very seriously, according to the emergency services. More than 20 ambulances and six rescue helicopters were in use. According to the RMT union, the dead man was the driver of one of the trains.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer thanked the rescue workers. The situation is deeply worrying, he wrote on the X platform.
The accident occurred at 5:15 p.m. local time in Elstow near Bedford. Images in the British media showed the damaged trains appearing to have collided with one another. Reports circulated on social media that it was not a head-on collision.
“I felt like I had been in a bomb explosion,” eyewitness Peter Knapp, who was in the front car of one of the trains involved in the collision, told the BBC. He saw faces covered in blood, people with apparently broken legs and “smoke everywhere.” According to the PA news agency, other passengers reported that people were thrown against seats in the impact. Some were “crying and screaming,” said one passenger.
Transport Minister Heidi Alexander was deeply concerned. According to your post on X, these were two East Midlands Railway passenger trains. Relatives of passengers were asked not to travel to the scene of the accident. According to rail operator Thameslink, all routes between Bedford and Luton have been closed.
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Simon Misteli (sim), born in 1995, has been working as an editor at the news desk since 2024. He writes about a wide variety of topics with a focus on foreign stories.
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