KOBE (Kyodo) West Japan Railway Co. on Monday let relatives of people killed in the disastrous April 2005 derailment in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture, inspect some of the train cars involved in the crash that killed 107 people.
Three relatives of two of the deceased viewed the cars in Himeji, where four cars of the seven-car train involved have been preserved below elevated tracks.
"My sorrow escalated and I couldn't move for a while," Tsuneo Okumura, 63, who lost his 21-year-old daughter in the accident, said with tears after seeing the wreckage.
Mitsuko Fujisaki, 71, stood in front of the wreckage to see how her 40-year-old daughter had died and to hear her "last voice."
Fujisaki said she hopes the wreckage preserves the lessons learned from the accident, just like the remnants of a Japan Airlines jumbo jet that crashed into a mountain in Gunma Prefecture in 1985, now on display at a JAL facility near Tokyo's Haneda airport, have become a permanent monument to the tragedy.
The wrecked seven-car train was returned to JR West on Feb. 1 from the Kobe District Public Prosecutor's Office, which had kept it as evidence in the trials of former JR West executives charged over the accident, which killed 107 people, including the driver, and injured another 562 people.