Train derailment at Kyoto Kintetsu Station, 30 people on board, no injuries

At around 5:15 a.m. on the 29th at Kintetsu Kyoto Station in Kyoto City, there was an accident in which a 4-car Kyoto Line local train from Kyoto to Kashihara-Jingumae derailed. The 30 passengers and three crew members, including the driver, were not injured. The National Transportation Safety Board dispatched railway accident investigators to the scene and began investigating the cause of the accident. Kintetsu held a press conference in Osaka on the afternoon of the 29th, and Hitoshi Takaura, general manager of Osaka Railway Headquarters, apologized, saying, ``We deeply apologize for the great inconvenience caused.We will investigate the cause as soon as possible and work to prevent a similar accident from occurring again.'' ...(snip)...The site of the derailment is about 120 meters west of the Kyoto Station platform, and there is a ``crossover'' that allows you to go back and forth between the up and down lines. It's a complex place with a total of six "points" where trains branch off on the curve, and it's said to be the only one on the entire Kintetsu line. At the time of the accident, the train was traveling at approximately 20km/h, below the speed limit. As the driver tried to move from the up-line side to the down-line side, the driver said, ``I felt like I was being pulled from behind the vehicle,'' so I made an emergency stop. Upon checking, it was discovered that the second and third bogies had derailed near the crossover. The point is that there were no abnormalities during inspections before the first train departed, and there were no records of abnormalities in operation while vehicles were passing. It has not been determined whether the cause was on the vehicle side or on the track side, and the company will continue to investigate.