Two commuter trains crashed head-on Tuesday in southern Germany, killing 10 people and injuring around 90 as they slammed into each other on a curve after an automatic safety braking system apparently failed, the transport minister said.
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Hundreds of emergency service workers, including mountain rescue teams, worked to save passengers at the crash site, where several derailed blue, yellow and grey train carriages lay on their side next to the track.
Ambulances could not reach the site, which was heavily wooded with a steep hill on one side and a river on the other, so helicopters had to airlift people to nearby hospitals. Ten of those had serious injuries, including the person who died in hospital.
“This is the biggest accident we have had in years in this region”.
He said that the scene was a “horrible picture” and estimated that the train had been travelling about 100kmph. Dobrindt said the reporters that there is a curve there, so it can be assumed that the train drivers must not have been able to see each other forehand.
Dobrindt, however, said it was too early to draw conclusions.
“The accident was a huge shock to us”, Bernd Rosenbusch, managing director of Bavarian Oberland Bahn GmbH, the parent company to regional train service Meridian.
German police say the death toll from a head-on train crash in the southern state of Bavaria has risen to nine.
The trains were equipped with an automatic braking system that would stop them if they ran through a red signal.
Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said at the news conference that at least one of the trains was not running to schedule.
About 150 more were injured – 10 seriously – in the crash, police said. Authorities said it took about three hours to remove the victims from the scene.
It was a small mercy that the train was not as full as it usually would be, because of a school holiday for the annual Carnival celebration, he said.
In Munich, the city blood centre put out an urgent call for donors in the wake of the crash.
The cause was unclear and police said that, alongside the rescue effort, investigations were starting into establishing what had happened.
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“We can only pray right now that the train was not packed out like on a regular basis”, he said. Tim Hume reported and wrote from London, and Nadine Schmidt and Atika Shubert reported from Berlin.
