Except at the time they did the knocking, they weren't really sure there were no survivors. Whichever gov't officials gave the order was based on their assumption, or maybe they didn't want to bother looking. I was shocked at how quickly the official pronouncement was made that there were "no more survivors," given the extent of the mess. And which turned out to be premature indeed. FWIW, the vertical car could have been multiple-tethered and then braced in position enough to allow a couple of rescue workers to actually take a good look. It's not rocket science with the heavy construction equipment around to do this.

I have not heard concrete pronouncement of how many people were in the affected cars. But for four cars (I believe that's the number most directly affected), plus the other more minor injuries in cars that stayed on the tracks, the total official number of dead and injured being only about 250 people seems awfully low, based on my experience of how full Chinese trains usually are. My next question would be: what happened to the rest of the passengers that were presumably in those cars? I can't believe there aren't still people missing, and some reports coming out of the media there seem to describe people still looking for loved ones that were on one of those trains.