At least 100 people, most believed to be stowaway passengers, were killed when a goods train derailed as it rounded a bend in West Kasai province on Wednesday night. Dozens were injured, many of them trapped in the wreckage.
Interior Minister General Denis Kalume Numbi led the government delegation, which includes the ministers for health, transport and humanitarian affairs as the government seeks to co-ordinate efforts to deal with the aftermath of the disaster.
Phamaceutical supplies needed by local hospitals to treat the 120 injured were dispatched on the delegation's plane from the capital Kinshasa.
The train was travelling the 300 kilometres (188 miles) between Ilebo and Kananga when it jumped the tracks as it negotiated a bend on the sloping flanks of the Luembe river, railway officials in Kananga said.
The director general of the state railway company SNCC, Medard Ilunga, told AFP that most of the victims were "clandestine passengers" who had hopped aboard the freight train.
"The illegals bribe the drivers in order to get on to a freight carriage, while other fare-dodgers travel on the roof of the carriages," said a railways official, on condition of anonymity. SNCC set up an inquiry to determine the cause of the accident, while the government has asked the transport ministry to rapidly conduct its own probe.
The disaster, the second accident on the 70-year-old stretch of track in West Kasai in three weeks, has thrown the spotlight on the dilapidated state of the country's rail network, most of it built under Belgian rule a century ago.
The SNCC badly needs new rolling stock and locomotives. Most of the tracks need to be replaced and passengers regularly take their life in their hands when they travel on the train.
"It is often the case that travellers find themselves blocked for several days in stations because of a lack of trains," said an official of the Congolese Observatory of Human Rights. Thursday's was the latest in a grim catalogue of disasters on the rail network in recent years. Twenty people were known to have been killed when a freight train derailed in the south-east of the country in February.
The victims in that accident were also described as stowaways, but it had not been clear at the time if they were fare-dodgers or included people who had illegally entered mineral-rich DR Congo from neighbouring Zambia.
The train which was transporting mostly food supplies derailed at Katanga, about 75 kilometres (45 miles) from the Zambian border. In November 2005, dozens of passengers were killed when the train they were riding on crossed a bridge that knocked them off the top.
A local official said at the time that people sitting on top of the train, as often happens in African and other poor countries, were swept away when some of their luggage snagged on the beams of the bridge across the Lufulu river.