Are Arsenal not only top but the Barcelona of the Premier League?

Arsène Wenger has taken Arsenal to the top of the Premier League with attractive football but are they the most attractive? Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

A friend of mine, an Arsenal fan, was explaining to me this week how her club's lofty standing in the Premier League was not only a triumph forArsène Wenger's men but more holistically for football in general. Arsenal, she reasoned, were "England's Barcelona" – an elegant team committed to playing the game in a morally and intellectually superior way; right-brained players who were creative and spontaneous, using speed and stealth to tickle opponents into submission; a fusion of home-reared youngsters with previously unheralded foreigners, all curated without spiralling the club into debt. They were, in short, a team that any neutral could get behind.

I don't support Arsenal but I couldn't disagree with her. Wenger has argued; "Football is an art, like dancing is an art" – and he truly lives (and dies) by that belief. After eight trophy-less years he was allowed to open the wallet this summer. He could have bought a reliable central defender or a proven goalscorer, as everyone implored him to do, but heopted instead for an attacking midfielder – Mesut Özil for £42m – of which he already had an indulgent surfeit. It seemed insane until it became clear that Wenger was operating on a deeper conviction: if he was going down, he was doing it with the most stylistically pure Arsenal team ever.

You have to admire Wenger and, with his team sitting top of the table and practically assured of qualification for the last 16 of the Champions League, respect him too. After seven major titles between 1998 and 2005 he has now gone half his career in north London without winning one. The website sincearsenallastwonatrophy.co.uk details the time to the second since that 2005 FA Cup victory and links to a list of events that have taken place in the intervening period: these include the invention of Twitter and the iPad, as well as: "Six people have been arrested for kidnapping a llama and taking it on a tour of the New York subway."

So Arsenal are underdogs these days and there is nothing the unaffiliated observer loves more than a team defying the odds. Still there was a problem with my friend's analysis. Hadn't she seen how smug Wenger has become in post-match interviews recently? Arsenal may play the most attractive football in northern Europe but, oh boy, do they know it. To borrow Tony Cascarino's favourite phrase, if Arsenal were an ice cream they'd lick themselves to death.

But the question remains: if not Arsenal's beautiful footballers, who should the neutral fan root for? Surely not Manchester United (too popular) or Manchester City (too spoiled). Liverpool are out (Luis Suárez) and so clearly are Chelsea (John Terry, Ashley Cole, take your pick).

Cursory research suggests Fulham might be an appropriate choice. Craven Cottage is the only stadium in Britain to have a specific "mixed" area called "Little Switzerland" set aside for spectators. It's a sweet concept but the team is a mess this season and, if you are going to have a secret soft spot for a club, then it's perhaps advisable not to pick one that's embroiled in a season-long relegation battle.

Where does this leave the neutral fan or the person who supports a lower-league team and is looking for some Super Sunday action? Assuming some basic criteria: 1) a team that plays attractive, attacking football; and 2) a team whose figurehead player has not been found guilty of racially abusing an opponent – there are some obvious candidates: Swansea, Southampton and any team that Roberto Martínez manages, because he's clearly a good guy.

I decided to find if there might be objective reasons for favouring one Premier League team over another from Omar Chaudhuri, an analyst for the stats experts Prozone Sports. Data cannot tell us how attractively a team plays, Chaudhuri reminds me, but it can offer us indicators of its philosophy (total numbers of completed passes per game, say) and its aggressive instincts (shots on goal).

Before Saturday's fixtures Arsenal placed third in the rankings of total and successful passes in the Premier League this season, behind both the top club Swansea City (538.9 passes per game) and Manchester City. The overall landscape, however, is heartening for all football fans: so far in 2013 nine teams average more than 400 passes each game – which compares with just one club in 2005-06 (Arsenal) and one in 2007-08 (Arsenal again). This statistic indicates that even the most unsophisticated teams are comfortable knocking the ball around these days. By this reckoning Premier League football has never been so cultured.

Of course, Chaudhuri notes, a team can pass the ball sideways all afternoon, "but, if this doesn't translate into goal-scoring opportunities, you might argue that they aren't exactly 'exciting' for a neutral". In terms of attack Spurs have taken easily the most open-play shots this season (17.5 per game) but sadly the quality of their shooting is close to the bottom of the league, with Andros Townsend being surprisingly profligate. Manchester City overwhelmingly create better chances than Spurs and are more clinical about finishing them, which might explain lastSunday's 6-0 scoreline.

But if you are looking for entertainment – goals at both ends, shots taken, open football – one team stands out and it's not a name you'd expect: Norwich City. Sure, this season has not exactly gone to plan – they were 16th before Saturday's match against Crystal Palace and the manager, Chris Hughton, appears to be staring down the barrel – but Prozone's model suggests they have faced the toughest opposition in the league so far and are due for an upturn. If you're on the fence about football teams, forget the Gunners and sing like a Canary

Tesco boss faces chorus of scepticism on profit margins

Tesco investors are still waiting on Philip Clarke's promise to come good. Photograph: Joe Fox/Alamy

The Tesco fightback is now 22 months old, if one takes the starting date as the day in January 2012 that Philip Clarke, then the newish chief executive, delivered a thumping profit warning and confessed that the UK business had been "running hot for too long."

It was a polite way of saying that Sir Terry Leahy, his predecessor, had taken his eye off the ball as he pursued expensive foreign adventures, notably in the US and China. The remedy was to invest £1bn in the UK stores to generate "a step change" in performance.

Investors are still waiting. If the City analysts are right (which is the way to bet), next Wednesday's trading numbers will be horrible. Like-for-like sales in the UK could be down 1.5% in the latest quarter. It will be hard for Clarke to repeat his half-year boast that Tesco's UK performance has strengthened. The group is losing market share and Aldi, Lidl and Waitrose are the current winners.

But a longer-standing Clarke boast obsesses the City. He has claimed he can reinvigorate Tesco in the UK while maintaining profit margins at 5.2%. How? The supermarket game comes with high fixed costs, and traditional wisdom says a fall in same-store sales implies a greater fall in profits. How can Clarke hope to defy the maths and maintain margins?

Theories abound. Is Tesco actually taking chunks out of costs? Surely not, since Clarke has been adding staff, trying to shorten queues, and smartening stores. Is it squeezing suppliers? That's broker Cantor Fitzgerald's explanation. Or is it pushing up prices and hoping that higher-spending customers stay loyal if they are thrown enough coupons? Or is the official line – that the trick can be achieved by replacing sales of low-margin TVs with high-margin Finest food products – correct?

Whatever the truth, Clarke faces a chorus of scepticism that he can hold the line on profit margins. JP Morgan thinks weak trading will deliver only 5.1% this year, followed by 4.6% next, and offers a sharp diagnosis: "We believe that UK industry margins are too high relative to other European markets."

If Aldi and Lidl did not exist, argues JP Morgan, there wouldn't be a problem. But the continental invaders are now a force: "As the discounters keep re-engineering their product quality and price, we believe that the core own label of the big players is no longer competitive. We expect Asda to break ranks and force industry margins down."

If that's a plausible plotline, should Tesco abandon its 5.2% target and take the lead in cutting prices? The strategy could be pitched to investors as a necessary short-term measure to get more customers through the doors to experience the apparent wonders of the new Giraffe cafes, Harris + Hoole coffee shops and tidier aisles.

Clarke is probably not ready to alter course, since chief executives tend not to be panicked by a single weak quarter. But he is no longer a new boss and Tesco's overseas operations, where sales trends are even worse, provide no shelter. He's got a big call to make. Now that he has correctly diagnosed the error of Leahy's later years, it will not look clever if he tries to defend a target that is too hot to handle.

One of these days, this column will take a vow of silence on Royal Mail's underpriced privatisation. But not quite yet, because the research notes from the previously gagged analysts (those from banks working on the sale) point to a theme that was barely mentioned at the time of flotation and has been largely ignored during the business select committee's disappointing postmortem.

Those analysts, almost uniformly, think Royal Mail's dividends could become a thing of wonder. They may not put it like that, but look at Goldman Sachs' forecast for the dividend payout: £200m this year, which Royal Mail has already announced; then £282m; then £352m; then £414m in the 2016-17 financial year. That's a compound growth rate of 27.5% for three years. Very few FTSE 100 companies, as Royal Mail soon will be, can match those hopes.

Then consider how Goldman's analyst thinks the dividend can be cranked up so rapidly. He does not expect fancy balance-sheet games, like taking on a tower of debt. Instead, it's down to cash generation. Goldman thinks Royal Mail, with £723m of net debt at last count, can be transformed to a position of net cash of £207m in March 2017, even after paying those dividends.

Nothing is guaranteed, of course, and Royal Mail is a stock that comes with well-advertised risks. But, come on, at the float price of 330p, the starting dividend yield was 6%, which was attractive in itself. If there is also a sporting chance of the dividend doubling by 2017, the shares were chronically underpriced. Goldman's 50-page report sets a "12-month price target" for the shares of 610p.

The MPs, if they want to get to the bottom of the affair, should ask whether ministers really appreciated Royal Mail's dividend potential under its new, far more generous, regulatory regime. Were they blinded by an obsession with the risk of a strike?

For the record, here's Goldman's view of the effect on its forecasts of any strike: "Given the potential for variable and wage cost savings, a minor impact."

Was Royal Bank of Scotland merely incompetent in its lending to small businesses? Or has it also been tipping companies into insolvency and then buying their assets at knockdown prices?

The former allegation was the gist of Sir Andrew Large's verdict on RBS, as contained in a report commissioned by the bank itself. RBS did not have processes and systems to meet its own lending targets. It overcorrected for previous reckless lending.

This is serious stuff, undoubtedly, but should not be of direct interest to the Financial Conduct Authority, since commercial lending is not a regulated activity. The right response is the one RBS has taken: overhaul the machinery of lending.

But the second allegation is explosive. Lawrence Tomlinson, an adviser to the department for business, alleges that viable businesses have been deliberately wrecked to make a profit for RBS. That plainly requires a full investigation and the FCA was right to insist that it, and not RBS, appoint the investigator. And, if RBS is guilty of disgraceful and possibly fraudulent behaviour, the regulator should hit the bank with everything it's got.

Outsiders can only keep an open mind at this stage. But one can understand why RBS' board is mighty miffed, to put it mildly, not to have been given a chance to respond to Tomlinson before he published.

Investing is easy with hindsight, but here's a bet you might wish you had made on 1 January: put an equal sum into each of the 11 companies in the FTSE 350 index who had women chief executives.

Your portfolio would include two fallers: Imperial Tobacco (Alison Cooper), down 2%, and Anglo American (Cynthia Carroll, now departed), 28% lower. But they would more than outweighed by gainers like BTG (Louise Makin), up 67%, and easyJet (Carolyn McCall), 86% higher. Overall, the women-only portfolio would have returned 28%, which is rather better than 12% for FTSE 100 index, the 22% by the FTSE 250 and the 14% by the FTSE 350 itself.

Statistically meaningless? Absolutely. The performance period is too brief, performance versus rivals matters more, and 11 companies is too few. But the fact that there are only 11 is perhaps the real problem.

Female-led firms are on the up

Investing is easy with hindsight but here's a bet you might wish you had made on 1 January: put an equal sum into each of the 11 companies in the FTSE 350 index with female chief executives.

Your portfolio would include two fallers – Imperial Tobacco (Alison Cooper), down 2%, and Anglo American (Cynthia Carroll, now departed), 28% lower. But gainers would BTG (Louise Makin), up 67%, and easyJet (Carolyn McCall, above), up 86%. Overall, the women-only portfolio would have returned 28%, rather better than 12% for the FTSE 100 index, 22% by the FTSE Mid 250 and 14% by the FTSE 350 itself.

Statistically meaningless? Absolutely. The performance period is too brief; performance versus rivals matters more; and 11 companies is too few. But the fact that there are only 11 is perhaps the real problem.

Out of the lab, off to market: a hi-tech blueprint for UK recovery

Ed Elias from Mountain Trike with one of the all-terrain wheelchairs the company hopes will be a hit in the US. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

When the 2011 tsunami hit Japan's Fukushima plant, causing one of the world's worst nuclear disasters, it set off a chain reaction of research into nuclear safety on the other side of the world. As Dr Tom Scott of Bristol University watched footage of Japanese workers risking their lives to measure radiation at the plant, he thought there had to be a safer way. And so the airborne radiation monitoring system was born: a flying machine the size of a bathmat that can be controlled from anywhere in the world, avoiding the need to send people in to contaminated sites.

In the event of an accident, his "hexacopter" machines, which are still at the prototype stage, would "automatically go up like an intelligent crowd of angry bees", says Scott. But that cannot happen until the machines manage to fly out of the lab and into full production.

Showing the hexacopter, and videos of it in action, to potential investors at a conference in London, Scott said: "We are really good at what we do: what we want now is to attract people who have the experience to spin out the company."

Keen to get back to the lab, he and his team are looking for someone to manage the business. "They will be guiding everything: relationships with customers, negotiations for licensing and leasing, recruiting, accountancy, marketing – and bringing in phenomenal contacts."

Another company on the hunt for investors is Mountain Trike, founded by engineering graduates from Bath University. It makes an all-terrain wheelchair that can tackle sand, snow and mud. Putting it through its paces on a somewhat less demanding plush carpet, commercial director Ed Elias told a crowd of potential investors how it has the shock-absorbers, wheels and powertrain of a mountain bike, controlled by levers to prevent users getting muddy hands. About 70 Mountain Trike wheelchairs have already been sold, but the company is looking for £250,000 from angel investors to help it crack the US market.

British universities are more preoccupied than ever with turning their best research into commercial companies. Traditionally, British scientists have excelled in the lab, but are less good at turning their ideas into money-spinning businesses. As one familiar lament goes, while the world wide web was created by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee at the Cern laboratory in Geneva, it was the whizzkids of Silicon Valley who spun the idea into the commercial gold of Google, Facebook and Twitter.

"We need to harness the intellectual horsepower in our universities," says Sir John Parker, president of the Royal College of Engineering, who believes a cultural shift is under way. "We are not where Silicon Valley is yet, but I believe we are heading in the right direction."

In a time of austerity, universities are being asked to do more to boost economic growth. In a government-commissioned report published last month, Sir Andrew Witty, boss of pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline, said: "This country leads the world in many cutting-edge technologies and inventions. But too often we fail to turn these great ideas into successful companies that create jobs." Witty wants to see a £1bn fund to help researchers at Britain's universities get their ideas to market.

The fact that the report was commissioned at all is another sign of the coalition's conversion to industrial policy. These days government ministers sprinkle their speeches with jargon such as "arrow project", "catapult centre" and "the eight great technologies". The coalition also chose to preserve Labour's Technology Strategy Board, an organisation that doles out public money to promising companies. Somehow, the UK has ended up with an industrial policy.

"It is one of the great surprises of the past few years," said Andy Westwood, a former Labour adviser and chief executive of GuildHE, a higher education lobby group. After the crash, Labour was reluctant to use the term "industrial policy", he said, "but now all three parties happily trot around that phrase".

The problem, says Westwood, is that 30 years of free-market philosophy have left the UK trailing behind rivals such as Germany that have spent years nurturing their manufacturing sectors: "We have slowly dismantled the infrastructure over three decades. You cannot just pull a lever and get it all back overnight."

With institutional investors focused on property and the stock market, would-be entrepreneurs find it hard to raise capital. Graham Harrison ofSetsquared, a collaboration between five English universities, says researchers are caught between angel investors – wealthy individuals who might invest up to £125,000 – and venture capital funds that are not interested in deals worth less than £10m. "Companies looking for half a million fall between two stools."

Setsquared has helped new companies raise £1bn over the past 10 years. One beneficiary is Jacob Marsh, 24, who founded his company while at university. Seeing the popularity of Raspberry Pi, the credit-card sized computers that have acquired cult status among programming hobbyists, Marsh hit on the idea of making cases for them. Initially he used 3D printers, but within a few days was overwhelmed with orders. SetSquared helped him find a factory to make the cases, which now retail for about £6 (ModMyPi.com). "Part of our success was that we were able to get the product to market so fast, and we could do that because we had the support."

But not everyone finds the ivory tower conducive to enterprise. Daniel Murray, a marine biologist, decided to leave academia to create his water-purification business. "A lot of professors are really set in their ways and don't do blue-sky thinking any more," he said. Last year he set up Industrial Phycology, which is trialling a water treatment process for Wessex Water. It uses algae to remove phosphates from waste water, in a process that should help utilities comply with EU rules aimed at reducing water pollution, as well as generating a byproduct that can be used for bioenergy. Murray has already been talking to investors in India – a big step for someone who hadn't even thought of starting his own company a year ago.

The public sector could be the key to a strong industrial policy, according to Westwood. The UK has huge strengths in the creative industries and life sciences: these could be used along with, say, the BBC and the NHS to "develop a sensible policy to support jobs".

In this way the public purse – from the NHS drugs and technology budget to high-speed rail projects – could be used to support British tech start-ups. "Even when cash is limited," he said, "you can still join some of the dots more cleverly."

THE GRAPHENE GRAB

Invented here, commercialised abroad? The government fears this could be the fate of graphene, the wonder material discovered at the University of Manchester.

Graphene is a one-molecule-thick layer of graphite (right) that is 200 times stronger than steel but six times lighter. First isolated by Russian-born scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselev using sticky tape, it is expected to have scores of uses, from touch screens to membranes in DNA sequencing.

Earlier this year, science minister David Willetts voiced concern the UK could fall behind in the race to develop commercial spin-offs. "We need to raise our game," he said when it emerged the UK had a fraction of graphene patents compared to its rivals.

Around 35% of graphene patents arise in the US, 20% in China, 10% in South Korea and less than 1% in the UK, according to patent consultancy CambridgeIP.

But Quentin Tannock of CambridgeIP said this did not mean that the UK had fallen behind: "I don't think there is just one race. Graphene is a very complicated technology with a huge number of uses." Patents only tell a small part of the story, he added. "You get many patents being filed that are really not worth the paper they are written on."

Gold price plunges as confident investors pile out of safe havens

Pawnbroker Albemarle & Bond has been melting down gold jewellery to pay its debts. Photograph: Alamy

November brought more bad news for believers in the eternal power ofgold: the commodity saw its sharpest monthly price fall since June. This month's 6% drop makes 2013 a terrible year for gold, and is set to mark the end of a 13-year boom. Gold is heading for its first annual fall since 2000 after shedding a quarter of its value this year.

Things were so different in September 2011, when it hit a record price of $1,921 an ounce, a gain of more than 550% in just over a decade. Investors had piled in during the financial crisis: the price of gold traditionally rises when assets such as shares, bonds and cash are threatened.

Gold maintained its allure as central banks pumped money into their economies, raising fears of runaway inflation. But then the easing of fears for the eurozone, and signs of economic recovery in the US and other economies, steadied nerves.

There were few starker signs of the reversal of gold's fortunes than the news that Britain's second-biggest pawnbroker was melting down stock to raise money. Last week Albemarle & Bond admitted it was smelting jewellery to sell for quick cash in order to stay within its lending limits. As recently as 2011 the company went on a gold-fuelled expansion spree and declared "the age of the pawnbroker".

More famous players have also been caught out. The gold fund of John Paulson, the hedge fund manager who made billions betting against the US housing market, is down 63% this year.

The key to the fall is the improving US economy and the response of the Federal Reserve. Gold's troubles began when the Fed said it would ease off its bond purchase programme amid encouraging news on jobs and growth.

With less need to keep money tied up in gold, which pays no interest or dividend, the markets turned "risk-on": investors scrambled for new shares in Royal Mail and other flotations, and US shares are at all-time highs.

Georgette Boele at Dutch bank ABN Amro said: "The gold bubble has burst and … more of gold's previous supportive drivers are about to push the precious metal much lower. As such we expect additional large sell-offs."

In India, traditionally the world's biggest consumer of gold, the government has imposed punishing duty on gold purchases which has led to mass recycling of some of the 20,000 tonnes of gold stashed in Indian homes.

Consumers in China have been buying gold as they become more affluent. But Boele predicts that despite this, it will fall to $1,000 an ounce next year and $800 in 2015

Co-op Bank investors back £1.5bn rescue

A number of other Co-op Bank bondholders still need to approve the deal. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The threat of emergency intervention by the Bank of England into the Co-operative Bank receded on Friday night after thousands of retail investors gave their backing to a £1.5bn lifeline for the troubled high street bank.

The support of the bondholders is a major step towards avoiding Threadneedle Street having to step in to wind up the bank but is part of a process that will force the Co-op Group – which owns supermarkets, funeral homes and pharmacies – to cede control of its banking business to bondholders, who have been led by aggressive US hedge funds.

The complex restructuring is still far from complete – a number of other bondholders still need to approve the deal – but the support of the retail investors was regarded as the biggest hurdle because they needed to be convinced to vote.

Some 13,000 bondholders had invested £370m in the bank using financial instruments that paid high returns and were relied on by pensioners for income. Other groups of bondholders also have to vote and a number of court hearings are necessary before the fresh injection of capital into the bank will be formally agreed.

Once it is, the Co-op Group will own just 30% of the bank – which is expected to be floated on the stock market late next year – and the bondholders will own the remaining 70% of the shares.

In joint statement on Friday night the management of Co-op Group and Co-op Bank said they were delighted by the support. "We are now highly confident that our £1.5bn recapitalisation plan for the Co-op Bank can be achieved," they said.

The Bank of England has given the bank until the end of the year to plug a capital shortfall identified in June but the bank's problems escalated this month after its former chairman Paul Flowers was arrested on allegations about buying drugs.

Its future has sparked a political row about whether Labour ministers encouraged the bank to merge with Britannia Building Society in 2009 – and now regarded as the source of many of its loan losses – and whether the coalition cheered on the now ill-fated attempt to take control of 631 Lloyds Banking Group branches.

The bank was forced to admit on Thursday that customers were moving their current accounts because of the Flowers scandal and the fears that it would be hard to maintain its ethical approach to business once the Co-op Group was no longer in control. But it had stressed that savers – a key source of its funding – had not been leaving.

The Co-op Group had warned that if bondholders had failed to back the restructuring they risked losing all their investments as the only alternative was "resolution" by the Bank of England.

Four dead and 63 injured in New York passenger train derailment

Emergency workers examine the site of a Metro-North train derailment in the Bronx. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

At least four people were killed on Sunday and 63 injured, 11 of them critically, when a passenger train heading into New York City derailed in the Bronx.

President Barack Obama said his thoughts and prayers were with the friends and families of the victims of the derailment. A White House statement said the president was briefed on the accident on Sunday morning and would continue to stay in touch with New York officials throughout the day.

Two carriages were flipped onto their sides in the early morning incident,which occurred at 7.20am about 100 yards north of Spuyten Duyvil station on the Hudson line of the Metro-North Railroad. The New York Fire Department, which coordinated a rescue effort involving hundreds of firefighters, police and railway workers, said 63 people were hurt when the seven-carriage, southbound 5.54am service from Poughkeepsie to Manhattan's Grand Central Station left the rails on a sharp bend.

Three of the dead were killed as they were thrown from the train, according to FDNY chief of department Edward Kilduff, who said he believed all the passengers and train crew were accounted for after a rescue operation that included divers searching for survivors in the adjacent Harlem River, and that he thought the casualty count was unlikely to rise further. At a press conference three hours after the derailment, officials said numerous passengers had been taken away on stretchers to local hospitals.

"Three of the four fatalities were thrown as the train came off the track and was twisting and turning somewhat," Kilduff said. "The train is pretty beat up. There was substantial damage inside and a lot of personal possessions thrown around. We believe we've searched the entire area and we don't have any other victims we're aware of."

Eyewitnesses said they saw dozens of scratched and bloodied passengers leaving the wreckage, several holding ice packs to their heads. Frank Tatulli, a passenger in the front carriage, which came to rest just inches from the edge of the Harlem River, told a local TV station that he felt the train was travelling "a lot faster" than it usually would coming into the station.

An anonymous law enforcement official told journalists the train's driver had said he tried to apply the brakes before the bend but that they did not work.

State officials indicated that they had ruled out criminal activity or terrorism as a cause and that the incident appeared to be an accident. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, visited the scene and told reporters that investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board would arrive later on Sunday.

"Four people lost their lives today, in the holiday season just after Thanksgiving, and they're in our thoughts and prayers," he said. "This is obviously a very tragic situation. The first order of business is to care for the people who were on the train. We are trying to save lives. New York is blessed with the best first responders I think anywhere in the country.

"In terms of causes, we don't know exactly what happened, The NTSB is on its way they'll do a thorough investigation and we'll wait to see what the NTSB say before speculating as to any causes."

Cuomo added that the train driver had been injured and was being cared for at a local hospital.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo arrives. Photograph: Andrew Gombert/EPA

Another passenger, Joel Zaritsky, told Associated Press he was travelling into the city for a dental conference.

"I was asleep and I woke up when the car started rolling several times," he said. "Then I saw the gravel coming at me, and I heard people screaming. There was smoke everywhere and debris. People were thrown to the other side of the train."

Thomas Prendergast, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said the speed of the train would be "one of the factors" investigators would look at, but that his first priorities were the injured passengers, then seeing if any service on the blocked line could be restored by the start of the working week tomorrow. Services were immediately suspended between Croton-Harmon and Grand Central. Amtrak services between New York City and Albany were also cancelled.

An MTA spokeswoman, Marjorie Anders, said the speed limit on the curve before Spuyten Duyvil is 30mph, compared with 70mph in the area before the curve. The train's data recorders should be able to tell how fast it was traveling, she said.

The stretch of line where Sunday's incident took place saw another derailment earlier this year, when a northbound freight train came off the track in July.

Dr David Listman of St Barnabas Hospital, one of four local medical facilities that treated victims, said the most seriously hurt passenger had a spinal cord injury. He also reported collarbone, leg and arm fractures, minor head injuries and many facial lacerations among those brought in. Railroad officials estimated later that between 100 and 150 people had been aboard the train, as witnesses and passengers who survived the crash came forward to share their experiences.

Hank Goldman, who lives close to the site, said: "I heard this horrible, whooshing sound. It was very disturbing, very loud. I got my binoculars and I couldn't believe my eyes that the train had jumped the tracks right here."

Passenger Amanda Swanson, from Harlem, said she was trapped in a carriage that landed on its side before she was pulled free by rescuers. "I was nodding off," she said. "I felt my body was at a 45-degree angle even though I was sat up in my seat, so I knew that didn't feel quite right. I could hear screeching metal over the music on my headphones.

"The windows broke out. The gravel came flying up in our faces. I really didn't know if I would survive. The train felt like it was on its side and dragging for a long time, the whole thing felt like slow motion."

She added: "I just kind of rode out the crash and tried to stay conscious and aware to do whatever I could to stay alive and uninjured. I could hear moaning and I could hear men communicating to each other that someone was stuck and they were trying to do what they could to make sure that person was all right.

"We couldn't get out, plus we didn't know exactly we were, how close to the river we were, even if there was any land for us to climb on to."

Westchester County officials warned that it would take at least two days for the track to be repaired, even after the wreckage had been removed. Aaron Donavan, a spokesman for the Metro-North Railroad, said the operation to clear the line would be extensive.

"The next step is to allow the NTSB to conduct a full and thorough investigation," he said. "When they give the all clear we can bring in heavy equipment. We need to get cars away from that area that will allow us to restore a service. Right now we don't have any trains running on any part of that track."

An injured man is evacuated from the scene. Photograph: Eric Thayer/Reuters

Donavan said it was "a black day" for the railroad, noting that Sunday's accident was the first passenger fatality in its three-decade history. It was also the region's second passenger train derailment in six months, after an eastbound train derailed in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on 17 May and was struck by a westbound train, injuring 73 passengers, two drivers and a conductor. Eleven days later, a track foreman was struck and killed by a train in West Haven, Connecticut.

Deborah Hersman, chairman of the NTSB, said a 15-strong team of investigators was due to arrive at Spuyten Duyvil by Sunday lunchtime.

"They will hit the ground running," she said. "They are focusing on operation, track, human factors, crash worthiness and survivability, any recorders, for example to see if we can identify any black box-type recorders that might be on board, looking at the signal system to see if there's any indication there.

"We've got a lot of work to do, we don't have a lot of daylight hours to do it but we'll do as much as we can as we get on scene to try to find out what happened so we can prevent it happening again.

Sellafield executives to face MPs as nuclear clean-up bill rises over £70bn

The huge Sellafield plant in Cumbria is regarded as the most dangerous industrial site in western Europe, not least because it houses 120 tonnes of plutonium, the largest civilian stockpile in the world. Photograph: David Moir/Reuters

The bill for cleaning up the huge Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria will rise even higher than its current estimated level of £70bn as operators struggle to assess the full scale of the task, according to sources close to the project.

The warning comes just days before private sector managers face a grilling from the public accounts committee, which is investigating activities at the facility.

It was hoped that the huge bill – eight times the cost of staging the London Olympics – would be capped at £70bn, but well-placed sources have told the Guardian that the operators are convinced they are still "not at the top" of the cost curve.

Sellafield is regarded as the most dangerous and polluted industrial site in western Europe, not least because it houses 120 tonnes of plutonium, the largest civilian stockpile in the world.

The cost of decommissioning the Calder Hall reactor plus a magnox fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield has been rising steeply, but the biggest task comes from "ponds" and "silos" filled with old equipment and deteriorating, highly toxic waste.

Nuclear Management Partners (NMP), the private sector consortium that manages the site, declined to comment, but other sources said those engaged in the clean-up were still some way from knowing exactly what was in the storage facilities. "Record-keeping in the past was clearly not what it should have been," said one.

The soaring cost of decommissioning, along with the apparent inefficiency of NMP – and the £230m of dividends it has received – will come under the spotlight on Wednesday at a meeting of the public accounts committee, which is chaired by Margaret Hodge, the straight-talking MP for Barking and Dagenham.

Tom Zarges, the chairman of NMP, will be questioned alongside Tony Price, the managing director of Sellafield, and John Clarke, the chief executive of the state-owned Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which is meant to oversee the clean-up process.

The committee has in the past been highly critical of NMP, not least for falling behind on 12 out of 14 key tasks being undertaken in Cumbria.

The senior nuclear executives will also be asked to comment on how £6m of bonuses came to be shared out among NMP bosses over three years and why the consortium paid back £100,000 in expenses that had been wrongly claimed.

The political temperature has been raised by the NDA agreeing to give a further five-year contract to NMP despite its performance being fiercely criticised by accountants in a recent report, which was not initially provided to the committee.

KPMG, working for the decommissioning authority, accused the clean-up group of overspending, failure to reach operational targets and weak leadership at the atomic complex in Cumbria.

Hodge has already said that, in the light of the critical review, it was "inexplicable" that the NDA was prepared to reward the NMP consortium, which she also accused of spending cash "like confetti".

NMP is made up of British firm Amec, American firm URS and Areva, the French engineering group, which is also engaged to help EDF of France build the nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset.

While the clean-up goes on there has been much speculation about how to deal with the plutonium, which in theory could be used to create dozens of atomic bombs if it fell into the wrong hands. Just storing this material is said to cost £80m a year and tThere are a variety of potential plans for reducing the stockpile, possibly by burning it or turning it into more fuel for reactors.

Talk of building a new mixed-oxide (Mox) fuel reprocessing plant has been undermined by a report out this summer that concluded a previous Mox facility, which closed two years ago, had left taxpayers with a £2.2bn bill rather than the healthy profit that had been promised when it was first constructed.