AHSA: Five railroad employees were crushed to death when a two-car freight train derailed on a passenger line in Al-Ahsa early Monday morning. One survivor was taken to hospital. “The accident occurred at 4.30 A.M. as the driver conducted a reverse maneuver that caught the workers, who were replacing track, by surprise,” said an official from the Saudi Railways Organization. “Five died at the scene and a sixth was rushed to a nearby hospital with multiple injuries.”The official said the incident led to the cancellation of four scheduled trains between Riyadh and Al-Hofuf the same morning. “Repairs are being conducted to reopen the line as soon as possible,” he said. Abdul Aziz Al-Huqail, the President of Saudi Railways, has ordered an urgent inquiry into the accident and demanded a full report within one week, but said that initial investigations pointed towards a “basic human error”. “The two cars rolled back because they hadn't been secured properly by the train supervisor,” he said. “This is one of his most elementary tasks, but he failed to carry it out.” Al-Huqail added that “98 percent” of train incidents in the Kingdom have been caused by human error. Safety standards on the country's railways are, he said, “slightly lower than those of Europe”, according to the most recent assessment. “We are classified as ‘medium', which is just a bit under the ranking of European countries,” he said. Despite a series of incidents on train lines in the Eastern Province over the last three years, Saudi Railways maintains that accidents are “limited and rare” given the number of freight train journeys which, it says, transport 330,000 containers per year. Most recently, two freight trains collided in mid-December at the approach to Haradh Station when a locomotive was guided on to the wrong tracks. No one was killed in the incident, but a train driver and another railways employee were taken to hospital with minor injuries. The incident occurred when one of the trains, both of which were transporting over 70 freight trucks, was asked to stop at a loading depot to allow the other to enter the station, but a signal error led to the approaching train being guided on to the same track.
