Dutch authorities face a "monster" task to recover a crashed passenger train which will require building a bridge over a canal, rail officials said on Wednesday.

The crash near The Hague on Tuesday, which killed one person and injured 30 others, left one double-decker carriage lying in a field and three others on or near the tracks.

Recovery teams must now build a huge bridge, reportedly weighing 100 to 200 tonnes, that can support a crane to lift the carriages over a canal separating the field from the tracks.

"It is a gigantic, monster job," Martijn de Graaf, a spokesman for rail network firm ProRail, told AFP.

"The bridge needs to be strong enough to support the crane to lift the train away. The carriages are in a meadow next to a ditch and a narrow road that is not made for it."

Mammoet (Mammoth), the company hired to move the train, was on site on Wednesday to evaluate the situation, he said.

Lifting the train will take "at least a day, maybe two", he added.

The crash was the most serious for years in the Netherlands, which normally has a good train safety record despite a busy network in this densely populated country.

A criminal investigation has been opened into the crash, in which both the train from Leiden to The Hague and a freight train collided separately with a maintenance crane on the tracks.

Three people remain in intensive care in hospital.

A government official said the cargo train had first hit the crane, whose driver was killed, before the passenger train hit the debris and derailed.

"This was a very violent incident, I was really shocked when I arrived here this morning," de Graaf said from the accident site.

"The damage is huge, the infrastructure is broken, the trains are broken, the trains are devastated inside."

The line is expected to remain closed until at least Tuesday.

Dutch King Willem-Alexander visited the accident site hours after the crash.