Passenger of Bedford crash says 90% of people on his carriage were injured

Passengers make their way on foot from the Bedford train crash, before boarding buses at Kempston Hardwick. Photograph: John Robertson/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Passengers make their way on foot from the Bedford train crash, before boarding buses at Kempston Hardwick. Photograph: John Robertson/The Guardian Passenger of Bedford crash says 90% of people on his carriage were injured Teacher Brett Byatt was onboard crash which kills driver, injures 89 people and leaves 33 needing hospital treatment Two trains collide near Bedford A survivor of the Bedford train crash has told how bodies were flung across the carriages, leaving people with broken bones and deep wounds after the rush hour collision on Friday night. Brett Byatt, a teacher from Bedford, was onboard the East Midlands railway (EMR) service which rammed into another slower travelling train resulting in a crash which killed the driver, left 89 with injuries and 33 needing urgent hospital treatment. Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, Byatt said the train wasn’t going at full speed and estimates they were only five minutes into their journey when the collision happened. He said: “The people in first class ended up with stomach and rib injuries, because they went into the tables they have in first class, and EMR trains, the way that they’re structured with seats, was probably the worst way it could have been structured for a train crash. “They (the seats) face each other in the three by three and the two by three, and… when people flew into one another, the seats that they were on, like, broke backwards into the people behind them.” Byatt, a teacher from Bedford, said he believes that 90% of passengers on his carriage were injured. “I’d probably say from three to four of us were uninjured in a full carriage; everyone else had either a serious wound that was bleeding profusely, or a situation where they couldn’t stand, or they couldn’t move their neck, and I saw a woman snap her leg.” View image in fullscreen The trains collided just south of the Elstow interchange between the A421 and the A6. Photograph: Thinzar Ko Ko/The Guardian Immediately after the collision, Byatt and other passengers began attending to people with first aid until emergency services arrived 10 minutes later. He thinks he was uninjured because he was standing near the doors, clutching a stanchion. Asked how he was feeling in the aftermath of the accident, Byatt said he initially felt shocked but is now “pretty angry”. “I don’t know at whom, who specifically, but it’s more about the, we’ve got one of the oldest railway networks, and signal failures happen a lot, and now I’m just wondering, why would a train driver lose his life over this?” Tony Miles, a prominent railway journalist, also told Today that the train will have a black box which will be able to tell investigators precisely what happened before the crash. “The signal system has a data recorder, they will know every switch that was pressed, they’ll