Soviet Trains Collide, Many Killed

MOSCOW — Many people were killed when a Moscow-bound passenger train collided with a freight train whose brakes failed as it sped into a southern Russian station, the labor newspaper Trud said Sunday.

Trud and other papers said railroad workers struggled to find a free track for the runaway freight train just before the crash Friday morning, but were thwarted by a conductor who stopped the passenger train, thinking it was missing its stop at a station.

But Trud said no evidence of misconduct or negligence emerged in the accident north of Rostov-on-Don.

“The most terrible was the place of the collision where doctors, railroad workers and soldiers fulfilled their sorrowful duty,” a Trud correspondent who visited the scene of the accident wrote. “After all, it was there that tens of people lost their lives--passengers, conductors.”

It did not give an exact number of deaths, but said the accident still was under investigation.

The newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said the three last cars of the 15-car passenger train were wrecked. “In them, only by a miracle several people survived.”

Sleeping cars in most Soviet trains contain eight four-person compartments. The train was likely to be crowded because it was returning to Moscow from a resort area during the height of vacation season.