What caused the alpine tunnel fire?

This railway was billed as one of the safest in the world

The numbers of those missing after the Austrian tunnel disaster has risen by four to 159.

But by mid-morning today - some two days after the accident happened - only 29 bodies had been recovered.

In London, the Foreign Office announced this morning that one British citizen was among those unaccounted for - he was named as Kevin Challis from Dorset, a ski instructor who worked locally.

But there is still no explanation as to why a funicular railway - billed as one of the safest in the world - should have burst into flames with such devastating consequences.

The Austrian authorities still say they have no idea how the fire started: the scale of the official inquiry is inevitably limited until engineers can gain full access to the tunnel.

Safety defended

Investigators have now reached the carriage

The car that caught fire was some 600 metres into a tunnel more than 3,000 metres long. The system underwent its last full five-yearly maintenance check in 1997, and its last annual inspection in September this year.

No problems were identified. In addition, the funicular railway completed one run earlier in the morning without passengers - as required by safety regulations. The head of Railways at the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Dr Karl Johann Hartig said it was impossible that there could have been a collision as the carriages in this system were hundreds of metres apart.

He also said reports that there were no fire extinguishers in the carriages were untrue. Extinguishers were present.

Source of fire 'mystery'

Tim Whittome is a mechanical engineer who organised the building of a funicular railway in Scotland's Cairngorms, as Chief Excecutive of the chairlift company there.

He knows the Kaprun line, and told the World At One that the risk of of fire was really quite small. It could have been a passenger was smoking a cigarette, in itself prohibited action on this railway.

The death toll now includes three Slovenians, a group of Japanese school-children and US military personnel stationed in Germany - alongside Austrians and Germans.

RELATED WEBSITES:

List of passengers reported safe and well

Austrian Red Cross(in German)