Police cleared one carriage, while five more stood at the station in the heat. Fearing detention, some migrants banged on windows chanting "No camp! No camp!"

One group pushed back dozens of riot police guarding a stairwell to fight their way back on board. One family — a man, his wife and their toddler — made their way along the track next to the train and lay down in protest. It took a dozen riot police wrestling with the man to get them up again.

It followed similarly chaotic scenes earlier at Budapest's main train station. After being allowed into the terminal, refugees were confronted with conflicting information regarding whether trains were departing.

“There’s a German flag on this train so we though it went to Germany. So it’s not going to Germany?” a man clinging with one hand to the doors of a train told a Reuters journalist, declining to be named.

The chaos in Budapest has become the latest symbol of Europe’s refugee crisis, the continent’s worst since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing wars, as well as economic migrants escaping poverty, have been arriving in Europe by rickety, overcrowded boat across the Mediterranean or over land across the Balkan peninsula, straining the bloc’s asylum system to breaking point and confounding efforts to forge a united policy.

The International Organization for Migration published new figures Thursday revealing the scale of Europe’s refugee crisis.