World News

Four trackside workers killed by an express train at a Japanese station

By Staff Writer  |  21 August 2026

A weed clearance gang was working at Shin-Kanuma station when a Tokyo bound express entered the platform. Three lookouts were posted. The operator says early accounts point to a breakdown in communication.

Four men clearing weeds from the track were struck and killed by an express train as it entered Shin-Kanuma station in Kanuma, north of Tokyo, on Thursday. All four were taken to hospital and later pronounced dead. The operator, Tobu Railway, and the police have described the dead as three workers and a supervisor.

Six other people at the site were unhurt: two further workers, three men posted on lookout duty and an on-site supervisor. The train was the Tokyo bound Spacia X express on the Tobu Nikko Line, a six car service approaching its stop at the station. None of the roughly fifty passengers on board was injured. The four who died were in their fifties and sixties.

Three lookouts were posted and the gang was still struck

The detail that will matter to anyone who plans work on or beside a running line is that the protection was in place. Three of the ten men on site were there to watch for trains, and they survived. The operator has said that the workers' own initial accounts suggest a possible breakdown in communication, and that exactly what happened before and during the accident remains under investigation.

We take this severe accident seriously and we will ensure preventive measures and never let this happen

Takao Suzuki, head of the railway business division at Tobu Railway

Vegetation clearance is routine, low value work of the kind commonly let to a gang on a short possession. It puts men on the formation with hand tools, facing away from the direction of travel, in a place where a warning has to be passed by voice or by whistle rather than by a physical barrier.

An accident of a kind Japan has almost engineered out

Fatal accidents caused by trains in service are rare in Japan, which runs one of the safest railways in the world on high levels of maintenance, training and signalling. The country's worst accident this century was in April 2005, when a rush hour commuter train derailed and struck an apartment building at Amagasaki in the west of the country, killing 107 people and injuring more than 500. An accident involving a derailed freight train and two passenger trains killed 161 people in 1963. There has never been a passenger fatality from a derailment or a collision on the shinkansen network since it opened in 1964.

That record is built on the operating railway. It says little about the exposure of the people who work on the infrastructure between services, which is where these four men were.

The question the inquiry has to answer

Where a lookout system is the only thing standing between a working party and a passing train, the system depends on three things holding at once: that the lookout sees the train early enough, that the warning reaches every man on the formation, and that every man has somewhere to go once he hears it. Any one of those failing is enough. The operator has not said which of them is in question, and until the investigation reports, neither can anyone else.