Derailed train in Poland exceeded speed limit

The train that derailed in Poland on Friday afternoon killing one and injuring 81 passengers exceeded the speed limit, the TVN 24 channel said on Saturday quoting a spokesman for the prosecutor's office. Four carriages of a passenger train bound from Warsaw to Katowice went off the tracks in the village of Baby, near the city of Piotrkow Trybunalski in central Poland at 4 p.m. local time on Friday. TVN-24 said the train was travelling at a speed of 118 kmph at a railway section, which had been under repair for a month, according to Andrzej Massel, undersecretary of state responsible for rail. The traffic there has been regulated by a semaphore and the speed limit has been set at 40 kmph. The emergency center for the Lodz district said many injured passengers had received medical aid at the site of the derailment and did not need hospitalization. Twenty-six people remain in hospitals. Rescuers have lifted the first carriage and found no victims underneath, the local media said. Andrzej Massel earlier denied allegations that the train was overloaded, and quoted railway experts as saying that the train was designed for 286 seats and was in fact carrying 280 people on Friday. "It is a normal number of passengers for this train," he said. "It was not overloaded, and this [the number of passengers] has nothing to do with the accident and safety provision." On Friday night, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Health Minister Ewa Kopacz visited the site of the accident.