Emergency services yesterday recovered the bodies of 13 people from the Selby rail crash as it emerged that the driver of the Land Rover, Mr Gary Hart (36), may have fallen asleep at the wheel.
The driver's wife last night insisted that her husband did not fall asleep while driving. At an emotional press conference Mrs Elaine Hart said: "It is rubbish that he fell asleep at the wheel." She said her husband had rejected the idea and had stressed that the crash was a tragic accident.
The recovery process was long and carried out with extreme sensitivity by crews of police and emergency service personnel at the crash scene in Great Heck, near Selby, Yorkshire.
At times blue tarpaulin was draped over sections of the mangled wreckage of the Great North Eastern Railways (GNER) train and the Freightliner goods train to preserve the dignity of the dead as they were removed.
GNER revealed that three of its staff who were working on the 4.45 a.m. Newcastle-London train on Wednesday were unaccounted for. British Transport police said it could take several days to confirm the number killed in the crash, and identification of the bodies recovered so far could also take a number of days, because of the nature of some of the injuries.
Two train drivers among the 13 people known to have died were named last night. They were Mr John Weddle and Mr Stephen Dunn.
A temporary road surface has been built beside the track to enable heavy lifting gear to be moved into place to begin clearing the wrecked carriages from the track. The lifting process is expected to begin today, but emergency services said that until the carriages were moved it was impossible to say whether more bodies would be found under the wreckage of two of the most badly damaged carriages.
But accident investigators searching for answers among the wreckage and the surrounding area said they could not rule out the possibility that the driver of the Land Rover who careered off the M62 may have fallen asleep.
The driver, Mr Hart, was delivering a car to a buyer in Wigan shortly after 6 a.m. when his car and trailer carrying a second car left the road, went down an embankment and was struck by the GNER train. The derailed passenger train with about 100 people on board was then struck by a freight train carrying 1,000 tonnes of coal.
All aspects of the incident were being investigated, including the weather at the time, the road condition and the condition of Mr Hart's Land Rover. Supt Tony Thompson of British Transport police said investigators were also looking at the possibility that Mr Hart could have fallen asleep during his early-morning journey. "That is obviously one of the conclusions that might be drawn," he said.