PORTUGAL observed a national day of mourning today, a day after a famous Lisbon funicular derailed and killed 17 people in the capital’s worst accident in recent history.

Authorities have given no information about those killed or the 23 that police said were injured in the accident.

The 19th-century streetcar is one of Lisbon’s big tourist attractions and is usually packed with sightseers at this time of year for its short and picturesque trip up and down one of the city’s steep hills.

Teams of pathologists at the National Forensics Institute worked through the night on autopsies, officials said.

The streetcar’s crumpled wreckage was still on the downtown road where it crashed on Thursday, cordoned off by police. Accident investigators were due at the scene.

Officials declined to speculate on whether a faulty brake or a snapped cable may have caused the accident.

The yellow-and-white tram, known as Elevador da Gloria, was lying on its side on the narrow road that it travels on, its sides and top crumpled. It crashed into a building where the road bends, leaving parts of the mostly metal vehicle crushed.

“It hit the building with brutal force and fell apart like a cardboard box,” Teresa d’Avo told Portuguese TV channel SIC.

She described the tram as out of control and seeming to have no brakes, and said she watched passers-by run into the middle of the nearby Freedom Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare.

Lisbon’s City Council halted operations of three other famous funicular streetcars in the city while immediate inspections were carried out.

Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa offered his condolences to affected families, and Lisbon Mayor Carlos Moedas said the city was in mourning.

Mayor Moedas described the incident as an “irreparable loss of human life, which left in mourning their families and dismayed the whole country.”