Major disruption on the rail line between Bedford and Luton will continue for at least a week after the collision of two trains which killed a train driver and injured 100 people.

In a statement setting out the effects on some services until 28 June, Network Rail said the disaster had been a “tragic, isolated incident”.

Engineers are working to remove the track’s overhead electrical wires and construct a temporary access road to the crash site.

This will enable two 110-tonne cranes to be used to lift the damaged trains and carriages on to trailers to remove them by road, allowing engineers to assess any damage to the track and complete the necessary repairs.

The line between Bedford and Luton will remain closed for the rest of the week as a result, with a limited rail replacement bus service in operation instead. There will be no services between Bedford and London St Pancras station.

A limited service will begin to run north from St Pancras as far as Luton from Monday, but there will be no services north of Luton on the busy commuter Thameslink line. Luton airport express services have been cancelled and a rail replacement bus will operate between Luton airport and Luton.

Investigations into the crash are continuing, but the managing director of Network Rail’s eastern region, Ellie Burrows, said “current indications are that this was a tragic isolated incident”.

She said work to remove the two East Midlands Railway (EMR) trains from the track was being carried out at pace.

“This is a complex and challenging task and our teams will be working tirelessly to reopen the railway so we can resume services between Bedford and London,” she said.

Passengers should “expect disruption to services through this area for the majority of next week and only travel if absolutely necessary”.

More than 80 passengers were treated in hospital on Friday night. As of Saturday morning, 28 were still in hospital, nine of them in a critical condition.

The Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) said on Saturday that its inspectors were continuing to gather evidence at the scene, which is just south of the Elstow interchange between the A421 and the A6.

“RAIB will conduct a full, independent safety investigation into this tragic accident,” the agency said in a post on X. “We will provide a further update in the coming days once we know more.”

Specialist investigators from the British Transport Police are working RAIB’s inspectors to determine what happened, and members of the public have been urged to refrain from speculation.

The trains involved were the 4.40pm Friday departure from Corby to St Pancras and the 3.50pm departure from Nottingham to the same destination.

The front of the Corby train was crushed when it crashed into the rear of the Nottingham train, and it also sustained damage to its rear carriages when they were shunted into the ones in front.

The chief constable of the British Transport Police, Lucy D’Orsi, said people in Bedfordshire had shown “immense kindness to those stranded on trains and casualties”.

One person from Elstow, who did not wish to be named, said a friend’s son had had a full view of the crash site from his home. “There was loads of people throwing out water and food over the fence. They did everything they could to try and help those people,” she said.

Network Rail said that while the Midland mainline was closed at Bedford, train operators would accept tickets for affected EMR customers on any alternative route. If customers decide to travel on EMR once the line is reopened, their connecting ticket on other operators also will be valid on that day too.

Journey planning apps and websites are being updated to reflect the changes to the timetable but may take a few hours to do so, Network Rail said. Customers are advised to check live travel updates before they travel.

The winding backstreets of London, Paris and Rome are a large part of their charm. But they are also a problem for electric carmakers. For a long time, squeezing big batteries into smaller, cheaper cars to fit European streets was too much of a problem, so manufacturers focused on bloated SUVs instead.

But that is finally changing. Battery technology has improved and Europe’s carmakers havecut manufacturing costs enough that they can now sell cars that might have a chance of fitting down a medieval lane or two.

The new Renault Twingo E-Tech is a case in point. Driving the city car through London attracts quizzical looks. Its bulbous headlights live up to the older petrol version’s “frog” nickname, and this particular model has a “mango yellow” paint job.

But small, European electric cars like this will be notable for more than their looks if they can slow the trend towards ever-bigger lumps of metal – and help fend off the challenge from Chinese rivals.

“The world is not going to be saved by big SUVs that are electric,” says Renault’s chief design officer, Laurens van den Acker, who led development on the Twingo. “The world is going to be saved by small electric cars. We need more of them and not less. We need them to become as popular as other cars.”

Car companies are probably not the obvious candidates for saving the world, but they do have a part to play in making vehicles that don’t pump several tonnes of planet-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Road transport currently accounts for about a fifth of EU emissions.

Switching from a small petrol hatchback to an electric SUV represents two steps forward and one step back in environmental terms. The larger car will not produce emissions directly, but more bulk and bigger batteries mean higher emissions associated with manufacturing and more energy needed to move compared to a smaller vehicle – not to mention clogging up streets.

Renault’s Twingo (priced from €19,490 in France and probably selling for about £18,000 when it launches in the UK next year) will go up against an increasing number of rivals in the city car and small car segments of the automotive market. Citroën has the ë-C3 and is planning to revive the venerable 2CV name for a forthcoming small electric model. Peugeot, Citroën’s sister company in the Stellantis group, has the E-208.

Renault and van den Acker have already had a hit with the slightly larger Renault 5 E-Tech, the 2025 winner of Europe’s venerable Car of the Year award. The Mini Cooper Electric and the Fiat 500e have also been on sale for several years, and more are on the way, notably the Volkswagen ID. Polo. There is also the very fun niche of even smaller “quadricycles” such as the Citroën Ami and the Micro Microlino.

Reversing the trend

The blossoming of smaller cars comes after decades of vehicles getting bigger. At 4.41 metres (14ft 5in) on average, cars manufactured in 2024 were 5% longer than in 2016, according to Dutch government statisticians. They were also nearly 4% wider at 1.82 metres (5ft 10in) – a particular problem for anyone trying to navigate the canal-side streets of Amsterdam.

Smaller cars had started to disappear because it became harder for manufacturers to make money on them. Safety regulations meant extra kit, which was tricky to package into smaller spaces. And when the shift to electric came, batteries were initially too expensive for cars that had traditionally been the most affordable.

If any brands can claim to be synonymous with small cars, they are Mini and Smart – the latter particularly for its two-seater model, the Fortwo. Smart became a joint venture between Germany’s Mercedes-Benz and China’s Geely in 2019, when it turned its attention to larger electric models, and it is now planning an electric version of the Fortwo, called the #2 (pronounced, awkwardly, as “hashtag two”).

Smart Europe’s boss, Wolfgang Üfer, told an industry conference last month that the #2 was the model everyone, including his own mother, had been asking for. But it has taken longer to develop because of the design challenges of packaging everything into a footprint less than three metres long.

“Making a big car is easy,” says Xuan-Zheng Goh, Smart Europe’s director for product, marketing and communication. “Making a small car is a real big challenge. You need to make some careful decisions.”

Demand for smaller cars has always been there in Europe, he says, but the key to making them financially viable was the falling cost of batteries.

To clamp down further on costs, Renault pushed to design the Twingo in two years rather than four, and did some of the engineering work in China. It also cut the number of parts from between 1,500 and 2,000 found in other cars to only 750.

Within those constraints, van den Acker says, the company sought to make “EVs that you could actually fall in love with”. On the Twingo, that translates to quirky touches such as the headlights and bright colours, a profile in which the windscreen and bonnet form a single line, and sliding back seats to allow for more legroom or boot space.

It is also “French and good taste”, van den Acker adds. ”What you guys in England love.” The trade-off, though, is range: the Twingo has a 27.5kWh battery that gives it a range of 163 miles – easily enough for the school run, but meaning this reporter had to stop to charge for 20 minutes on a weekend return trip from London to Oxford.

Cupra, owned by Volkswagen, is another manufacturer shrinking its product with the launch of its electric Raval. Starting at £23,785, the car is “a gamechanger” for the company, according to Markus Haupt, the chief executive of Cupra and its Spanish sister brand, Seat.

“We said, OK, now is the moment to bring these cars,” Haupt says, pointing to increased demand for electric vehicles in the UK and Europe. “With this car we have the perfect package to convince [customers] that electro mobility is not the future, it’s the present.”

Getting the cost of production down was a crucial first step, Haupt adds. That required billions of euros of spending across the Volkswagen group to produce a new platform – a shared manufacturing blueprint used as the basis for several cars across different brands. Production costs should be about level with petrol cars “by end of this or beginning of next decade”, says Haupt.

Carmakers have another big reason to try to switch to electric for the millions of small cars in Europe: they need to hit emissions targets in order to avoid fines. That will be impossible without making EVs their top sellers.

However, governments setting the rules – including in the UK – have come under a lot of pressure from the industry to slow the pace of change. Carmakers may be able to sell more hybrids to meet their legal obligations – an option for some small cars such as the Toyota Aygo and the Fiat 500 – albeit at the cost of much higher carbon emissions.

Chinese rivals

But, as ever in the European car industry, there is an elephant in the room: Chinese rivals. China’s relatively new cities and wide roads do not necessarily need smaller cars, but the country’s carmakers know there is a market for them in Europe.

BYD, the world’s largest electric carmaker, has the Dolphin Surf city car, while Stellantis is helping to distribute the Chinese manufacturer Leapmotor’s T03. Smart’s cars, meanwhile, are designed in Europe but engineered and made in China.

Haupt said European manufacturers welcomed the competition, but that China’s manufacturers should be pushed to source components and produce cars in Europe, given the huge government subsidies across Chinese industry that last year prompted the EU to impose tariffs on Chinese cars.

The EU’s new “Made in Europe” rules are expected to go further still, giving a strong incentive to manufacturers to build within the bloc (with the UK at risk of being shut out). That may well mean European buyers will always pay more for small cars, but the upside might be more Chinese carmakers setting up factories there.

“I think for Europe, looking where we are standing now on our industrial basis, it will be super-attractive,” says Haupt. ”This would create employment. This would attract investment to Europe.”

The weekend in Elstow usually sees jolly locals romping around the quaint, picturesque village walking their dogs or enjoying a pint at the pub. But on Saturday afternoon, the mood was more sombre.

“It’s horrible isn’t it. I hope everyone is all right,” said Nando DiGennaro. “It’s just a one out of a million thing.” The 45-year-old HGV driver is referring to the train crash nearby on Friday that has left the storybook Bedfordshire village, with its Tudor houses and lush, stony gardens, reeling. He said air ambulances hovered above the area into the evening as the scale of the tragedy became clear.

Taxi drivers told the Guardian they had driven stranded passengers all the way to London as they scrambled to return home.

From those onboard when the trains collided, stories emerged of the sheer shock and terror they faced. Brett Byatt, a teacher from Bedford who was on one of the trains, told the BBC’s Today programme he saw most people on his full carriage “bleeding profusely, or a situation where they couldn’t stand, or they couldn’t move their neck, and I saw a woman snap her leg”.

Another passenger onboard one of the struck trains, Dr Peter Knapp, said: “Suddenly there was an impact. I thought it was a bomb, I saw a lot of smoke and people on the floor, bloodied faces. A lot of people crying and screaming. In a video posted on social media, passengers can be seen bloodied and screaming shortly after the impact. “I managed to open the doors and squeeze out. I was in quite a lot of shock, my glasses had fallen off. We were in the middle of nowhere in a field,” Knapp said.

The crash between EMR services between St Pancras and Corby and St Pancras and Nottingham has left one train driver dead and nine people in a critical condition. In total 100 people were injured.

One Elstow local, who did not want to be named, was in the car with her daughter near the crash site when it became clear “something devastating” had happened. “I witnessed emergency services flying around and you could sense there was panic,” she said. “The sense of worry and anxiety of knowing something dreadful had happened was unnerving in itself.”

She said some of her neighbours were on that train. “Some really good friends of mine were on that train and have got significant injuries,” she said, including one with a head injury. Another friend onboard ran out of battery on her phone. “Her husband couldn’t find her until 4am. For him, it must have been tragic not knowing what happened to her.”

The woman said her friend’s son had full view of the crash site from his house. “There was loads of people throwing out water and food over the fence. They did everything they could to try and help those people,” she said.

Her daughter, like many other people in the village, regularly uses the EMR service. “There’s a sombre mood in the village. Everyone’s feeling emotional,” she said.

Another villager, who did not want to be named, was on an EMR train back from London after watching Les Miserables. He knew something was amiss when “one of my party started getting texts saying: ‘Are you OK?’”. Not long after, they all began receiving similar messages.

“It’s a commuter town and so many people use those trains. Even though it was commuter time thankfully it was a Friday,” he said. Nevertheless, he was concerned because “there was a Harry Styles concert and a lot of people from Bedford were going to that”.

He thinks the impact of the crash will be felt throughout the village and the wider area. “Our kids go to the local Bedford school. It’s inevitable that some people connected with the schools will have been impacted,” he said.

“It’s the classic shock of ‘it doesn’t happen to us’,” he said. “The trains are such a big part of local life. It makes everybody realise it could have been them or their children.”