Eyewitnesses said that shortly after 6 p.m. on Wednesday, a carriage of Lisbon’s iconic Gloria funicular sped down a steep cobblestoned street, veered off at a bend, slammed into a building, and crumpled.
Helen Chow, who was at the foot of the hill, told the BBC the carriage “went out of control,” hurtling downhill at full speed before crashing on its side.
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 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.
Just before the crash, Ms Chow, who is originally from Canada but was visiting Lisbon, said she heard a loud screech.
She saw the bottom carriage fall back a couple of metres, past the white line where it usually halted, and make “a hard stop” at the end of the tracks.
Ms Chow 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.”
Abel Esteves, a Lisbon resident, was in the lower 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 said.
Another witness was running to help after the lower carriage dropped – before seeing the other coming down “out of control”.
“We only had time to escape, turn our backs and run,” they told Sic Notícias television channel. “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.
