The official New China News Agency said a boy was found unconscious by firefighters inside the wreckage and taken to a hospital.

The rescue came shortly after three senior railway officials were fired in response to the collision, which killed at least 43 people and injured more than 200 in Wenzhou, a city in Zhejiang province.

The accident took place Saturday night when a train from Hangzhou stalled after being hit by lightning and was then rear-ended by a train originating from Beijing. The violent crash sent four carriages from the oncoming train tumbling 66 feet off an elevated track.

Rescuers found hundreds of terrified passengers trapped under debris.

"Please save us," a passenger wrote on a Twitter-like blog. "The train is leaning toward one side now. And it's totally locked. The first few carriages hit each other."

Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao called for an "all-out effort" to rescue passengers and dispatched Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang to the scene of the accident, state media reported.

Still, anger remained high Sunday among Chinese Internet users who posted millions of comments online mourning victims while also questioning the safety of the national high-speed rail system and calling for a thorough investigation.

"The railway minister should be required to resign his post immediately; don't go blaming lightning for this incident, the one who should be blamed most is you!" read a comment translated into English by the website ChinaGeeks.

Many were outraged over video that was posted online Sunday showing backhoes breaking apart carriages that had fallen off the elevated tracks. Another photograph online showed what some thought were the same backhoes burying parts of the train.

Internet users suspecting a cover-up questioned how evidence could be destroyed so quickly and wondered whether the carriages had been properly inspected by rescue teams for passengers first.

Authorities have so far been unable to explain why the oncoming train did not stop in time and whether engineers anticipated vulnerabilities to lightning strikes.

The disaster will no doubt invite greater scrutiny of the already beleaguered Ministry of Railways.

The three officials who were fired Sunday included the head of the Shanghai rail bureau and the bureau's Communist Party chief, whose jurisdiction included one of the trains.

The ministry was rocked by scandal in February when its chief, Liu Zhijun, was dismissed after allegedly taking $125 million in kickbacks tied to shoddy construction work.

Two months later, the ministry reduced maximu