Two trains packed with “hundreds” of rush hour commuters (通勤者) collided head-on near Bad Aibling, in Bavaria just before 6.50 am on Tuesday morning. Police have confirmed nine fatalities and some 150 injured, of which at least 15 people suffering life threatening injuries, and 40 severely injured. One of the trains derailed(出轨) in the crash and several wagons overturned after the collision, which took place around 37miles south of Munich.
The accident took place on a single-track rail, and state-owned operators Deutsche Bahn are now investigating whether the cause of the incident was a signal failure.
German Transport Minister Alexander Dobrint said the trains were on a curve and it appears that neither had time to brake before they hit head-on. Dobrint told reporters in nearby Bad Aibling that speeds of up to 60 mph were possible on the stretch and since “the site is on a curve, we have to assume that the train drivers had no visual contact and hit each other without braking.”
He says the stretch was fitted with a safety system designed to automatically stop trains to prevent such a crash and it’s not clear why it didn’t function. He says black boxes recovered from the trains should provide more answers once analyzed.
Federal police spokesman Stefan Brandl said that the crash took place “in an inaccessible region” which meant to take emergency services until after midday to evacuate all survivors. Brandl said the stretch of line on which the two trains crashed is squeezed between the Mangfall river on one side and a forest on the other. Rescue helicopters had to carry people on a rope across the Mangfall river to ambulances waiting on the other side.
The rail line is used by commuters going to Munich for work and is usually a large number of schoolchildren, but as German schools are currently on a winter break, there was a limited number of children on board.
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