Germans Gong Cheebye Over Train Accident! 9 Dead, Over 100 Injured! Gong Cheebye!

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Nine people are dead, two are assumed missing and 50 seriously injured after a head-on collision between two trains in Germany's southern state of Bavaria, police said Tuesday.

Altogether, 100 to 150 people suffered injuries in the collision, police say. They estimate there were about 150 passengers on board the two trains.

The crash occurred shortly before 7 a.m. Tuesday local time near the spa town of Bad Aibling, about 60 kilometers (37 miles) southeast of the Bavarian capital of Munich.

Speaking at a news conference, German Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt said one of the trains had "drilled" into the other, leaving a carriage "totally dismantled." He described the scene as a "horrible picture," saying it was estimated the trains had been traveling about 100 kph (62 mph) at the moment of impact.

Trains collide head-on in Germany
8 photos: Trains collide head-on in Germany
The crash occurred on the Mangfall Valley Railway, a single-track regional rail line between the towns of Rosenheim and Holzkirchen, according to train company Meridian.

"This is a difficult hour for the railways in Germany," said Dobrindt, describing the crash as "one of the biggest we have had for years."

"We cannot imagine that such an accident can happen here," he said.

'We really have no clue'
How the two trains came to be running directly toward each other on the same track is still unclear, authorities say, and they are reluctant to speculate too much before data recorders are analyzed.

But investigators appear to be focusing on human, technical or infrastructure errors as possible causes, rather than other factors such as terrorism.


Two of the three data recorders on board have been recovered so far, and it was expected that the third would be recovered from the wreckage, said Dobrindt.

He said the collision occurred at a bend in the railway line.

"There's a curve there, so we must assume that the train drivers must not have been able to see each other beforehand," he told reporters.

Christian Schreyer, board chairman for Transdev, Meridian's parent company, told CNN that it was baffling that the crash could have happened.

"We really have no clue how this could happen," he said.

Automatic braking system
Authorities say the railway was equipped with an automatic braking system that would stop trains from running on a track where they were not supposed to be.

The safety system was implemented across the country's railways after a 2011 crash in the town of Oschersleben, in eastern Germany, in which 10 people were killed, said Dobrindt.

Both trains in Tuesday's crash also had both a driver and a driver instructor on board, said Schreyer. It would be extremely unlikely for both drivers on a train to miss a red signal -- and then for the automatic braking system not to kick in, he said.

"We assume that those signals were green, but we don't know yet," he said.

Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said at the news conference that at least one of the trains was not running to schedule. "Why they did not stick to the timetable, we don't know. This has to be investigated," he said.

Schreyer said trains were permitted to run at 120 kph, or just under 75 mph, on the line, and he believed they were moving at some speed when they collided.

"I don't think that (they) were on full speed, but looking at what has happened, they have been not very slow, let's say it that way," he said.

"It's really, really rare. We've been running the trains here for 12 years, and we've never had an accident yet."



Austrian emergency services called in
More than 600 police and rescue workers -- from Germany and neighboring Austria -- scrambled to the crash scene, which is in a hilly, forested region. Dobrindt said police were on the scene within minutes of the crash.

Helicopters and boats ferried the injured to hospitals and clinics. Authorities said it took about three hours to remove the victims from the scene.


Medical authorities have issued an urgent call for blood donations to help treat the injured, and counselors are being deployed to assist victims and their families. Dobrindt said that emergency workers would also need counseling for what they had faced.

A journalist at the scene, Stephan Richter of German broadcaster RTL, told CNN that the Mangfall Valley Railway was one of the most important lines in the region, used by workers commuting from Bavarian villages to Munich.

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.

"We can only pray right now that the train was not packed out like on a regular basis," he said.

Meridian said it could not comment on the condition of the train drivers.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a statement Tuesday that she was shocked and saddened by the disaster. "My sympathies go out especially to the families of the nine people who lost their lives," she said.


CNN's Max Foster, Stephanie Halasz, Lindsay Isaac and Damien Ward reported from London. Tim Hume reported and wrote from London, and Nadine Schmidt and Atika Shubert reported from Berlin.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/09/eu...ain-collision/


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