Earth Changes
"It wasn't pretty to see," one reindeer rancher, Ingmar Blind, told state television network SVT.
The animals, which provide a livelihood for many in remote northern Sweden, met their fate on Saturday near the village of Kaitum in the country's Laponia region.
Near-misses by railways are common as herds migrate during winter in search of food.
But in this case it appeared the herd had wandered onto snow-covered tracks and were startled by the train, the regional transport official in charge of maintenance, Fredrik Rosendahl said.
The reindeer instinctively all ran along the tracks before the train, which crushed them.
"If you follow a reindeer in a car, for instance, it will tend to run in front of the car, it won't go to one side," Rosendahl explained. "So just imagine what happens with a train that needs more than a kilometre (1.2 miles) to come to a stop."

Man-eater: Police in India are hunting a tiger which is believed to have killed seven people over two weeks
- Woman's body was found in a forest in Uttar Pradesh, India yesterday
- The tiger believed to have strayed from the Jim Corbett National Park
- Authorities trying to have it categorised as a 'man-eater' so it can be killed
The tiger's latest victim was an unidentified woman who was found in a forest Tuesday in Uttar Pradesh, India yesterday.
The female tiger is believed to be prowling over an area covering around 80 miles and is considered to be far more dangerous than others in the area due to a lack of hunting experience that forces the desperate cat to move closer to human occupation.

This three-foot-long ball python was found by store staff inside Wind Mobile at Richmond’s Lansdowne Mall on Monday.
Employees at Lansdowne Mall's Wind Mobile were preparing to close just before 6 p.m. Monday when a staff member walked into the store's back room and spotted a snake near a microwave oven.
Val Lofvendahl of Richmond-based Reptile Rescue was called in to handle the situation.
"First thing we do is, because we don't know what we're dealing with, we grab a container and a pair of gloves and hope that it's nothing - but prepare for possibly something aggressive," she told the Province.
Lofvendahl and her daughter arrived shortly after being called and were escorted by security through the closed mall to Wind Mobile, where two frightened employees were waiting outside the store front.
Inside, Lofvendahl found the snake on top of a cardboard box.
A Missouri lawmaker lays the groundwork for homeowners to get sinkhole insurance.
Our entire region is at risk for sinkholes because of the porous limestone and Karst formations under the Ozarks.
But most insurance companies exclude sinkholes from coverage.
That's a gap Senate Bill 691 seeks to fill.
Springfield homeowner Mark Hill is still paying for a near disaster that happened one year ago.
"We had a collapse between the two houses which was not a sinkhole, but was an old mine shaft," he said.
When the mine shaft opened up it went well under the corner of his neighbor's house and extended eight feet underneath his house.
"My air conditioning unit fell into the hole," he said.
The hole on the 1300 block of Kater Street (near Broad Street) left the Waste Management truck stuck.
Police taped off the area around the truck a little after noon as utility crews responded to the scene. The sinkhole also appeared to swallow up some of the sidewalk on the north side of the street.
A tow truck freed the trash truck, which was able to drive away. No one was hurt.Workers at the scene inspected water and gas lines below the street for damage.
Villagers woke on Monday to find the narrow beach at Mo Tat Wan strewn with the carcasses of large fish. Scores more decaying fish were to be seen floating by the village pier.
Residents were stunned by the quantity of fish, which measured up to two feet and were identified by experts as sea bass, cobia and croaker - species common in Hong Kong fish farms. They said the smell of the decaying fish had engulfed the entire village.
One resident, who asked not to be named, described seeing "bloated, rotting carcasses" on the beach, along with the "usual piles of litter".
"The beach was littered with dead fish, with even more dead fish floating in the water near the pier," she said. "It's sad. It appears the Lamma channel gets used as a dumping ground for lots of things, a great deal of which gets washed up at Mo Tat Wan. Nothing ever seems to be done about it."
It is so cold in the Miyun District that a waterfall has actually frozen solid.
The sub zero conditions have caused havoc in places, but not in China where they're using the plummeting temperatures to their advantage.
Any ice cool tourists brave enough can scale the usually raging torrent with the help of some crampons and a pickax.
Freezing weather conditions have battered much of the globe with parts of America dropping to -60 thanks to Winter Storm Hercules.
Conditions in the north of America are so historically low that the world-famous Niagara Falls actually froze spawning some truly amazing snaps.
Lake Michigan steamed because the water was warmer than the surrounding air, and the small town of Hell froze over - for real.
CFA state duty officer Scott Purdy told 3AW radio crews responded to 256 fires between 5pm and 12am.
The Mallee and Wimmera received the most strikes as electrical storms hit the region and continued to other parts of the state including the central Victorian towns of Castlemaine, Daylesford, Woodend, Macedon, and metropolitan Melbourne.
There are still 22 fires burning in the Mallee. Waterbombing helicopters are monitoring the region and central Victoria to identify strikes before conditions worsen later in the week.
The CFA fears more dry lightning, which means lightning with not enough rain to combat its effect, will hit the state today.
The CFA battled several grass fires yesterday, with the most serious at Kangaroo Ground which is now under control.
There is a total fire ban across the state.
Over the weekend powerful storms roared down South.
In North Carolina, hurricane strength winds destroyed a condominium complex.
In Georgia, two girls had to be rescued after a tree fell on their home.
Meanwhile, a big thaw from Pennsylvania to Maine is causing major flooding concerns for millions.
In Vermont, roads have been closed and some residents are being forced to use sand bags.
In western New York, homes and yards looked like swimming pools due to massive flood waters. Crews had to use boats and even a bulldozer to rescue residents trapped by the rising water.
Forecasters say more flooding is expected in the coming days.

After having to prematurely abandon their mission due to being stuck in ice, and having a weather forecast provided that said all they had to do was wait a few more days, which came true, freeing the ship, the intrepid Dr. Turney and his gaggle of global warming geese tourists were evacuated by helicopter to the Aurora Australis, which then sailed to the Australian Casey Station to finish the resupply operations that got interrupted by Turney's distress call.
The #spirtofmawson people are still at Casey Station, waiting for their ride home, while the Akademic Shokalskiy has made it to port in New Zealand. See the current positions of both ships:










Comment: Dry lightning? Maybe. But then there's also this coming down from overhead:
Breaking News: NSW, Australia - Meteor spotted, 12 January 2014