Five passengers were seriously injured when a landslide derailed a train in a mountainous area of the canton of Graubünden in eastern Switzerland on Wednesday, following heavy rain in the region.
The accident occurred around 12.45pm on the Rhaetian Railway line linking Saint Moritz to Chur.
Graubünden cantonal police said there were 200 people on the train, which derailed between Tiefencastel and Solis.
There were no fatalities but at least five people were seriously injured, and two others suffered minor injuries, police said.
Earlier reports indicated that none of the injuries were serious.
Three carriages derailed, with the carriage behind the locomotive plunging down a slope, the Blick newspaper reported online.
The paper quoted a witness who said there were 10 passengers aboard that carriage.
Police issued a statement at 3pm saying that a rescue process was still under way, with Rega emergency rescue helicopters and ambulances on site.
Paramedics were looking after passengers in shock, the statement said.
Blick reported a massive response from emergency services.
The newspapers said four helicopters, eight ambulances and 60 fire fighters came to the site, along with paramedics and police officers.
All passengers aboard the train were safely evacuated, 20 Minuten reported about four hours after the derailment.
The accident came after six passengers were injured in a crash elsewhere in Graubünden on Tuesday night when a trailer-truck sideswiped a Swiss Post bus on the A13 motorway between Sufers and Spilligen, cantonal police said on Wednesday.
The injured bus passengers were transported by ambulance to hospital for treatment.
Media in Israel have identified the three Israelis who died on Monday in yet another accident when a Zentralbahn train crashed into a minibus at a level crossing in the canton of Nidwalden.
The victims were Amal Khalil, 53, Atef Haj, 48, and Nasif Bader, 52, all from Marar in the Galilee region of northern Israel.
One other man and four women were injured in the crash at a crossing without security barriers in the municipality of Wolfenschiessen.
Two of the three men who died were policemen, The Times of Israel reported online.
The newspaper identified Khalil as the head of the police investigations division in northern Israel, while Haj was a police investigator.
It said the wounded man was Wafa Azzam, the brother of Azzam Azzam, who served eight years in an Egyptian prison for spying on Israel.
The four Israeli couples, aged between 40 and 60, were on a holiday to explore central Switzerland — Lake Lucerne, Titlis mountain and Kapellbrücke — when the accident occurred at around 8.40am.
It is not clear why the van travelled across the tracks just as the passenger train came, but it appears the minibus was headed to a small road that leads to a waterfall, visible from the crossing.
The accident at the crossing is the second in less than three weeks and has raised safety concerns about the number of crossings without safety barriers on the narrow-gauge Zentralbahn line.
The group of four men and four women, Druze from northern Israel, were traversing a rail crossing near the picturesque village of Wolfenschiessen when their mini-van was struck by a speeding train. Wolfenschiessen is about 14 miles south of Lucerne and 45 miles south of Zurich.
A freight train operated by the company ERS Railways sideswiped a EuroCity line at Mannheim’s central station on 1 August, knocking over two of the passenger train’s cabins with 110 people on board in Germany.
EuroCity 216 was on its way from the Austrian city of Graz to the southwest German city of Saarbrücken. The freight train was travelling from the western German city of Duisburg to Sopron in Hungary when it rammed into the passenger train.
Forty people suffered light injures in the accident while five were seriously injured, according to a spokesman for Mannheim’s fire department. The spokesman said that the accident likely would have been worse, had the trains not been travelling at a slow speed due to their proximity to the central station.
It’s unclear what exactly caused the collision. Mannheim’s central station was closed after the accident.
