At least 60 people were killed and more than 400 injured when two crowded passenger trains collided after one of them derailed in a pre-dawn mishapon Monday, in east China's Shandong province, railway authorities said.

Fifty-seven people were killed on the spot and three others died at hospitals, the Jinan Railway Bureau said. Among the injured, the condition of 70 people is critical.

The train from Beijing [Images] was en route to Qingdao, a famous summer resort in Shandong, and the other was travelling from Shandong's Yantai to Xuzhou in eastern Jiangsu province, when the mishap occurred in Zibo city, Xinhua news agency said.

The Qingdao-bound train derailed, with 10 carriages toppling into a ditch and ramming the other train, causing it to veer off the tracks.

The Zibo city government has rushed a 1,500-member team to help the families of victims. Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang arrived at the site to oversee the rescue operations.The neighbouring cities of Jinan and Weigang have dispatched rescue teams comprising medical workers and policemen.

The injured included four French nationals, the provincial foreign affairs office said.

"We were still sleeping when the accident occurred," a 38-year-old woman from the provincial capital Jinan, who along with her 13-year-old daughter managed to come out of the wrecked train through a big crack in its floor, told Xinhua. "I suddenly woke up when I felt the train stop with a jolt. In a minute or two, it started again, but soon toppled," she said.

The accident has thrown the traffic out of gear on the Jinan-Qingdao Railway, a key provincial link.

This is the second major accident in Shandong this year after a high-speed train from Beijing to Qingdao ran through a group of railway workers, killing 18 of them and injuring nine others.

China, where millions of migrant workers travel, has the highest density of passenger and freight traffic in the world.

Two trains had collided in central China's Hunan province in 1997 claiming the lives of 126 people in one of the worst rail mishaps in the country's history.