Passengers escape after train rolls on to beach

Twenty passengers escaped with minor injuries yesterday when the first carriage of a three-coach train rolled down a steep bank and ended on its side on a beach.

Twenty passengers escaped with minor injuries yesterday when the first carriage of a three-coach train rolled down a steep bank and ended on its side on a beach.

The driver of the 12.50pm from Londonderry to Belfast broke his leg after his train hit a boulder. One female passenger suffered a head injury but walked away from the crash. A total of eight people were treated in hospital.

Investigators from the state-owned Northern Ireland Railways believe the derailment was caused by a landslide in which one huge stone hurtled down a cliff face and bounced across two roads before ending up on the track. All three coaches were derailed in the crash at Downhill, on the Co Antrim coast, but one of the carriages remained upright.

A police officer at the scene said: "It's very lucky no one was killed, it looks like quite a horrendous crash."

Ciaran Rogan, the head of marketing at Translink, the transport organisation of which the rail system is a subsidiary, said: "It's miraculous there weren't multiple fatalities. The driver would have seen the boulder as he came around the corner but couldn't stop in time. We are keen to talk to the landowner from where it appeared to check what sort of maintenance was in place."

In a separate incident, a police chief inspector was one of two men killed in a road accident yesterday on the A77 Glasgow to Ayr road at Fenwick, east Ayrshire, at about 7.15am. Hugh Davidson, 44, and Jason Muir, 31, died when their vehicles were involved in a head-on collision. Mr Davidson's 35-year-old male passenger, a superintendent with the force in Strathclyde, was detained in a stable condition in Crosshouse Hospital, Kilmarnock.

In Surrey a child was among three people killed in a crash at 11.30pm on Monday night. Two vehicles were involved in the accident on the southbound carriageway of the M23 at Junction 9, near Gatwick. The girl, believed to be aged 10, and her mother, in her 20s, were pronounced dead at the scene, with another female passenger in the same car, also in her 20s. Surrey Police said they would not be releasing the names of the victims yesterday.

In east Yorkshire 10 people were injured, three seriously, after a three-car accident on the B1242 at Rolston, near Hornsea.