Crash Victims Are Remembered
As the search for victims entered a sixth day, Britons on Sunday remembered those people who perished in the country's worst train crash in a quarter century. Many family members who lost loved ones in Tuesday's train disaster broke down as they were led by religious leaders for a closer look of the burned out rail cars. The outdoor memorial service was held in a nearby supermarket parking lot.
Special prayers were said at churches across the country and an open-air service took place on Sunday afternoon near the site in west London where two passenger trains collided on Tuesday, killing 40 people and injuring dozens more.
There is good news of sorts, reports CBS News Correspondent Tom Fenton. In one coach where police and forensic experts feared up to 50 victims had died in a blazing inferno, they found evidence of only one body. Officials now say the death toll could be lower than expected.
"Our estimate of those who died in the fire is between thirty and forty," police spokesman Andy Trotter told CBS Radio News, adding that the recovery teams are "working through the debris, sifting carefully for any remains that might be there."
That's a lot less than the 70 to 100 initially feared dead. But that will not cool public anger at the government and the rail companies, widely seen to have sacrificed safety for profits by refusing to install devices that could have avoided the crash.
An American clergyman, the Reverend Kris Kramer, who ministered to survivors and their families at St. Mary's Hospital, shares that anger.
"I think that what makes this so heartbreaking is that there is an element of avoidability, and that's what's so tragic," Kramer said.
Avoiding blame was the game played by officials on the Sunday talk shows here, including Gerald Corbett, the head of Railtrack, the company that maintains the track system. "I'd like to make the factual point," Corbett said, "that Railtrack is not responsible for the whole of the industry's safety."
At morning service at the nearby Anglican church of St. Michael and All Angels, the congregation held a five-minute silence and the Rev. Anthony Andrews spoke of the community's "sorrow, disbelief, shock and hurt."
"On this day no words of mine would be altogether appropriate or adequate," Andrews said.
Bishop of Kensington, the Right Rev. Michael Colclough, who was to conduct the service later Sunday at a supermarket parking lot overlooking the crash site at Ladbroke Grove, said he expected a large attendance - but few relatives.
"This is too early and the moment is too raw for them," Colclough said. I think it's more for local people who felt this and who have been stunned by it all week."
Although a formal service of commemoration has been scheduled for next week, most local churches held special prayers Sunday and the nearby Roman Catholic Church of Pius the 10th planned a special evenng mass.
Westminster Abbey said it will include special prayers at its services.
Across the commuter towns of Reading and Swindon, west of London, congregations stood for a minute's silence and said prayers for the dead and their families.
A preliminary report out Friday indicated the Thames Trains service passed through a red signal light before colliding with the First Great Western train.
The crash was Britain's deadliest since 1975, when a train crashed in a dead-end tunnel at Moorgate underground station in central London in February 1975, killing 43 and injuring 74.