'I'm at 190, I am going to derail'

The train that derailed in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on Wednesday night, killing 80 people and leaving about 180 injured was reportedly travelling at more than twice the speed limit.

The driver of the train made a panicked phone call moments before the crash saying that the train was going too fast. "I'm at 190 [km/h] and I'm going to derail!" the engine driver told the controllers of Renfe, the rail network.

Two men were at the controls of the train at the time and it was not clear who had made the call.

Police sources told Spanish newspaper El Pais that, moments after the crash, the traumatised driver made another call to the operator.

"It derailed!" he said. "What am I going to do, what am I going to do? We are all humans . I hope there are no fatalities because it will all be on my conscience."

Both the drivers escaped the crash with minor injuries.

The carriages careened off the tracks at a curve approaching the station at Santiago where the limit is set at 80km an hour.

Investigators were trying to urgently establish why the train was going so fast and why fail-safe security devices to keep speed within permitted limits had not worked.

Bodies covered in blankets lay strewn around the train track next to overturned carriages after the impact as flames and smoke billowed from the wreckage and bloodied passengers staggered away.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who was born in Santiago de Compostela, toured the crash scene alongside rescue workers and went to a nearby hospital to visit some of the wounded and their families.

"For a native of Santiago, like me, this is the saddest day," he said.

He said judicial authorities and the public works ministry had launched parallel investigations into what caused the crash.

Eyewitness accounts backed by camera footage of the moment of disaster suggested that the eight-carriage train carrying 218 passengers was speeding as it tried to turn left underneath a road bridge.

The footage, which the Spanish railway authority Adif said probably came from one of its cameras, shows the train carriages start to buckle soon into the turn, with the first and second passenger carriages leaving the tracks first.

The engine itself quickly follows, violently tipping on to its right side as it crashes into a concrete security wall and bulldozes its way along the ground.

In the background, all the rear carriages can be seen starting to decouple and come off the tracks. The picture goes blank as the engine appears to crash directly into the camera.

An American survivor of the crash, Stephen Ward, 18, from Utah, told The Daily Telegraph that he felt lucky to be alive.

"It was like a scene from hell. There was blood everywhere, my own and other people's. And bodies were being carried out. They [rescue workers] were pulling people from the wreckage. Some were already dead and others looked like they were about to die. We were like the walking dead," he said from a hospital bed in La Coruna.

It marks the worst rail accident in Spain since about 500 people were killed in 1944 in a three-train collision inside a tunnel near Leon, in the northern centre of Spain.