Seconds From Disaster - Derailment at Eschede

The Eschede derailment occurred on 3 June 1998, near the village of Eschede in the Celle district of Lower Saxony, Germany, when a high-speed train derailed and crashed into a road bridge. 101 people died and around 100 were injured. It remains the worst rail disaster in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany and the worst high-speed-rail disaster worldwide. The cause was a single fatigue crack in one wheel which, when it failed, caused the train to derail at a set of points. Intercity-Express trainset 51 was travelling as ICE 884 "Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen" on the Munich to Hamburg route; the train was scheduled to stop at Augsburg, Nürnberg, Würzburg, Fulda, Kassel, Göttingen, and Hanover before reaching Hamburg. After stopping in Hanover at 10:30, the train continued its journey northwards. About 130 kilometres (80 mi) and forty minutes away from Hamburg. and six kilometres (3.7 mi) south of central Eschede, near Celle, the steel tyre on a wheel on the third axle of the first car broke, peeled away from the wheel, and punctured the floor of the car, where it remained embedded. What ensued was a series of events that occurred within minutes yet took investigators months to reconstruct. The tyre embedded in the rail car was seen by Jörg Dittmann, one of the passengers in Coach 1. The tyre went through an armrest between where his wife and son sat. Dittmann took his wife and son out of the damaged coach and went to inform a conductor in the third coach. The conductor, who noticed vibrations in the train, told Dittmann that company policy required him to investigate the circumstances before pulling the emergency brake. The conductor took one minute to go to the site in Coach 1. According to Dittmann, the train had begun to sway from side to side by then. The conductor did not show a willingness to stop the train immediately at that point and wished to investigate the incident more thoroughly. The crash occurred just when Dittmann was about to show the armrest puncture to the conductor. As the train passed over the first of two points, the embedded tyre slammed against the guide rail of the points, pulling it from the railway ties. This guide rail also penetrated the floor of the car, becoming embedded in the vehicle and lifting the axle carriage off the rails. At 10:59 local time (08:59 UTC), one of the now-derailed wheels struck the points lever of the second switch, changing its setting. The rear axles of car number 3 were switched onto a parallel track, and the entire car was thereby thrown into the piers supporting a 300-tonne (300-long-ton; 330-short-ton) roadway overpass, destroying them. Car number 4, likewise derailed by the violent deviation of car number 3 and still travelling at 200 kilometres per hour (125 mph), passed intact under the bridge and rolled onto the embankment immediately behind it, striking several trees before coming to a stop. Two Deutsche Bahn railway workers who had been working near the bridge were killed instantly when the derailed car crushed them. The breaking of the car couplings caused the automatic emergency brakes to engage and the mostly undamaged first three cars came to a stop. The detached front power car came to a stop after passing Eschede railway station, three kilometers (two miles) farther along the track. The front power car and coaches one and two cleared the bridge. Coach three hit the bridge, which began to collapse. Coach four cleared the bridge, moved away from the track, and hit a group of trees. The bridge pieces crushed the rear half of coach five. The restaurant coach, six, was crushed to a 15-centimetre (6 in) height. With the track now obstructed completely by the collapsed bridge, the remaining cars jackknifed into the rubble in a zig-zag pattern: Cars 7, the service car, the three first-class cars numbered 10 to 12, and the rear power car all derailed and slammed into the pile. The resulting mess was likened to a partially collapsed folding ruler. An automobile was also found in the wreckage. It belonged to the two railway technicians and was probably parked on the bridge before the accident. The crash produced a sound that witnesses later described as "startling", "horribly loud", and "like a plane crash". Nearby residents, alerted by the sound, were the first to arrive at the scene. Erika Karl, the first person to walk into the accident scene, photographed the accident site. Karl said that, upon hearing the noise, her husband believed initially that the accident was an aircraft accident. After the accident, eight of the ICE carriages occupied an area slightly longer than the length of a single carriage.