* Bodies strewn on ground
* Many passengers were heading to festival
* Relatives missing
By Teresa Medrano
SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, Spain, July 25 (Reuters) - Witnessesto one of Europe's worst rail crashes on Thursday describedharrowing scenes from hell after a speeding train jumped off thetracks and slammed into a wall in northwestern Spain.
At least 80 people died after the train hurtled into a sharpbend on Wednesday night at what media reports said was twice thepermitted speed outside the pilgrimage centre of Santiago deCompostela, on the eve of a major religious festival.
"My God, my God, how awful!" wails local resident IsidoroCastano, as he records the scene immediately after the crash ina home video published on the website of El Pais newspaper.
Castano, from the district of Angrois on the outskirts ofSantiago, was one of the first on the scene, where bodies werestrewn next to the track and flames and smoke billowed fromcarriages.
"I was talking to them so they wouldn't sleep, so theywouldn't die. It was hell," he told the newspaper.
"The scene is shocking, it's Dante-esque," said the head ofthe surrounding Galicia region, Alberto Nunez Feijoo.
The impact was so powerful that part of the train flew overa high wall into an area which was due to be used to celebratethe festival of St. James, one of Jesus's 12 disciples, whoseremains are said to rest in Santiago's centuries-old cathedral.
Ana Taboada, a 29-year-old hospital worker, who livesopposite the railway embankment, was one of the first on thescene.
"When the dust lifted I saw corpses. I didn't make it downto the track, because I was helping the passengers that werecoming up the embankment," she told Reuters. "I saw a man tryingto break a window with a stone to help those inside get out."
Many of those on the train were headed to Santiago tocelebrate the festival. City authorities cancelled allfestivities as the city went into mourning.
MISSING RELATIVES
"The worst thing is the uncertainty, I feel desperate" saidTomas Lopez, whose wife and two children were travelling on thetrain, as he searched for them at Santiago University Hospital.
"My daughter is OK but I don't know where my wife and sonare. My wife brought them from Madrid to see museums and such...I have been looking for them all night from one place toanother," he said, tears rolling down his face.
Mar Linares, 42, from the Galician city of La Coruna, saidher 15-year-old son Marco, who was travelling from Madrid on thetrain, is in intensive care.
"He was trapped by train wreckage but he managed to pull ahand free and that was how he was found. He says there was alady on top of him who had been travelling with a little girl,and the lady was dead," she said at the hospital.
Castano's shaky footage shows a carriage sliced open like acan and its seats spewed on the ground several metres away.
"People were shouting, 'Get me out!' Emergency serviceshadn't arrived and neighbours were trying to get them outthrough the windows, using pieces of train for stretchers,"Castano said.
(Additional reporting by Elizabeth O'Leary; writing by BarryMoody, editing by Catherine Hornby)
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