Police say 12 people have been injured, two of them seriously, after a train crashed into a transport truck in northern Germany.

The crash occurred early Wednesday when a regional train hit a truck stopped on a rail crossing in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, not far from the Danish border.

A spokesman for Neumuenster police, Michael Heinrich, said it was unclear why the tractor-trailer stopped on the tracks. The driver managed to jump from the cabin shortly before the crash.

German news agency dpa reported that the train partially derailed, interrupting traffic between Hamburg and Flensburg.