ReutersIt was just after 18:00 on Wednesday when a carriage on Lisbon’s famous Gloria funicular careened around the bend of a steep cobblestoned street, crashed into a building, and crumpled, eyewitnesses said.
The carriage “lost control”, descending at full speed and crashing on its side, Helen Chow, who was at the base of the hill, told the BBC.
It sounded like a bomb, she said, followed by “complete scary silence… There was pitch black smoke. Once it dissipated, you saw exactly what happened.”
People were frantic and crying, with others running to help, she described.
“It was awful,” she said. “I am shaken.”
Police are still investigating the cause of the crash, which killed at least 16 people and injured about 20 more, some critically, near Lisbon’s Avenida da Liberdade in the Portuguese capital.
Video verified by the BBC shows the crashed yellow-and-white train against the building on the bend of a hill, with another train stopped at the bottom. People are running up the incline towards the scene of the crash.
The two carriages of the 140-year-old funicular, which runs on electric motors, are attached to a cable that enables one to travel downhill while the other goes uphill, passing each other briefly along the three-minute one-way journey.
Witnesses described how the carriage near the bottom of the hill, which was starting to ascend, crashed a short distance backwards before the upper carriage raced down the incline and into the building.
Rasha Abdo was travelling in the lower carriage when suddenly “there were no brakes in our cable car, it was going down fast, with acceleration, like there was no control”.
It came to a stop with a “very hard” hit and people crashed into each other, she said.
Abel Esteves, a Lisbon resident, was also in the bottom carriage with nearly 40 people when he saw the other “coming down at a great speed”.
“I shouted to my wife, “we are all going to die here”, because I thought that funicular was coming down to hit ours,” he told the BBC.
Ms Chow, who is originally from Canada but was visiting Lisbon, heard a loud screech and saw the bottom carriage make “a hard stop” at the end of the tracks.
She saw black debris and heard people screaming as the driver rushed to open the gates to the entrance.
“People jumped out of the window of that tram,” she said. “Just as this happened, I saw the incident tram crash over into the building next to the Subway restaurant.”
Mrs Abdo said her husband jumped out with her son, and she was about to, but by then the other carriage had already crashed.
Another witness was running to help the lower carriage – before seeing the other coming down “out of control”.
“We only had time to escape, turn our backs and run,” they told Sic Notícias news outlet. “It came down and struck the building at high speed.”
Teresa d’Avó said the carriage “hit a building with brutal force and collapsed like a cardboard box,” telling TV channel SIC it seemed like it “had no brakes”.
Tour guide Marianna Figueiredo was among those who rushed to the scene to try to rescue people.
“I started to climb the hill to help the people but when I got there the only thing I could hear was silence.”
Ms Figueiredo said she initially thought the second funicular was empty, but when the roof was pulled off she “started to see the dead bodies”.
“We tried to instantly call the ambulances and the firemen to help,” she said, adding that the local community, including drivers and shop workers, assisted.
“A lot of people were crying around me. They were very frightened. I was trying to calm down the people – asking their names, where they came from,” she said.
She said what she saw is “very difficult to describe”.
“It was very bad. A big tragedy.”
Some tourists told the BBC they had almost taken the funicular at the time of the crash.
Eric Packer, from the US but visiting Lisbon on holiday, told the BBC he had discussed with his friends taking the cable car and took pictures at 18:00 and 18:01, but decided to walk back to their hotel instead.
They walked about 60 metres and heard a loud crash noise “like a rock falling, like a dump truck had dropped a load of rocks” at 18:02.
They turned around to see dust coming out of the alley about 45 metres behind them and walked back to see what happened. At first, he thought it was the train at the bottom that fell, until he turned and saw the other train that was above it, and realised “the magnitude of what had taken place”.
His photograph shows the yellow-and-white train, a tangle of metal, on the corner of the narrow alley under a Subway restaurant sign, with the other train at the bottom of the hill below it.
“People [were] walking up and running up to try and help,” he said. “Horrible tragedy and our thoughts and prayers go out to the families and survivors.”
Additional reporting by Alex Akhurst, Bernadette McCague, Marina Costa and Alice Cuddy
