Slowly, and with great care, members of the London Fire Brigade and the emergency services continued the grim search for bodies in a badly charred carriage at the scene of one of Britain's worst rail disasters yesterday, as police disclosed that more than 100 people are feared to have been killed.
Police said they had no idea how many human remains might still be inside one 48-seat first-class carriage, which was burned out by a fireball when a high-speed passenger train collided with a local commuter train in central London on Tuesday.
"All the seats are gone. Everything is gone. It's probably knee-deep in ash. It's just a shell," said Mr Tony Thompson of the British Transport Police.
"What is under the ash, we just don't know," he said.
As the number of dead crept slowly upwards, the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, told the nation to "brace ourselves now for an even higher death toll" as he declared the British government was determined to get to the bottom of what caused the tragedy.
The Deputy Prime Minister, Mr John Prescott, under pressure to rebuild public confidence in the rail service, announced an urgent independent inquiry into train protection systems designed to prevent trains from passing through red signals, which appears to be the cause of Tuesday's crash.
It will be conducted by Sir David Davies, president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and will be separate from the public inquiry announced shortly after the crash. Sir David's initial assessment will be made available at the end of December, and the inquiry will investigate the "effectiveness, practicability and cost" of the current train protection systems.
While the cause of the accident has yet to be confirmed, it was clear from a joint statement issued by Railtrack, First Great Western Trains and Thames Trains that the focus of their initial investigations is now pointing to the driver of the Paddington-Bedwyn train having passed through a red signal near Ladbroke Grove. The statement said the driver of the First Great Western Train, which was heading into London from Cheltenham at a speed of up to 70 m.p.h., was authorised to proceed under a green light. But it went on to say that "following reports that it passed a signal at danger", the investigations would now concentrate on the behaviour of the Thames train from Paddington to Bedwyn.
The investigations will also focus on signal 109, the red signal thought to have been passed at danger. The history of complaints by train-drivers, most recently to HM Rail Inspectorate, that the congested signal system on the main western line into London is badly positioned and difficult to read will be another focus of investigations.
Signal 109 has been implicated in eight separate incidents since 1993. Only last year it was at the centre of a near miss on the same line when the driver of a high-speed First Great Western train from Paddington to Westonsuper-Mare passed the signal at danger. A tragedy was avoided only when the driver made an emergency stop and the train came to a halt 200 yards from a stationary train on the same track.
But the statement was denounced as "reprehensible" by Mr Mick Rix, the general secretary of the train drivers' union, ASLEF, who said it was not helpful to establish a public inquiry "and then issue daily bulletins apportioning blame".
Earlier, ASLEF announced it would ballot its members on a nationwide strike unless rail companies responded positively to its demands within seven days to introduce the Automatic Train Protection (ATP) scheme throughout the rail service as well as in-cab radios for its drivers. The union is seeking a meeting with Mr Prescott to discuss their demands.
But Mr Rix warned the government it could not hide behind the argument that ATP was too costly to install. "We will not tolerate any more unsafe working practices and we will not tolerate our members, or the public, being put at risk," he said.