German police have dismissed as premature reports that human error was the most likely cause of Tuesday’s two-train collision in Bavaria that claimed 10 lives and left 17 seriously injured.
Special cranes were installed yesterday to remove wreckage from the crash site, south of Munich near the Austrian border, as Bavarian leader Horst Seehofer vowed a swift investigation.
“We have to try and draw consequences from this to make such tragedies less likely in the future, we owe that to all victims,” said Mr Seehofer after visiting the site.
Police confirmed the Bavarian death toll at 10 yesterday – nine men and one woman, including four employees of a private train operator.
They blamed a communication error for police reports on Tuesday of a further, unidentified body trapped in the wreckage.
First examination
No young people or children were among the dead, something authorities attribute to the school winter holidays.
A first examination of on-board black boxes recovered from the train wrecks found no indication of human error among either train driver.
However, several German media outlets claimed that a controller in a local train station overrode in-track security systems to allow both trains travel simultaneously down a one-track stretch between Holzkirchen and Rosenheim where they collided shortly before 7am.
A day after the crash, German prosecutors searched and sealed the guard station in Bad Aibling Station, nearest to the crash site. But police rejected the media reports of human error as speculation.
“We reject vehemently this rumour,” said Jürgen Thalmeier, a Bavarian police spokesman at the crash site. Human error could not be ruled out, he said, but there was as yet “no strong indication” of suspicion against any party.
A 50-strong investigation team are investigating all possible causes for the crash. But a spokesman for Pro Bahn, Germany’s rail passenger lobby group, said “you could scarcely do more for security than was done on this track”.
The stretch of track where the accident took place is equipped with magnetic sensors designed to trigger automatically a train’s brake it if ignores a stop signal.
“It is practically impossible that two signals simultaneously allow travel on such a track,” said Prof Jochen Trinckauf, a transport safety specialist on German national radio.
The crash is Bavaria's worst since 41 people died in a rail crash in 1975. In 2011, 10 people died in eastern Germany when a passenger train collided with a cargo vehicle.
