Germany Train Crash Kills 4, Injures Dozens
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
BERLIN (Worthy News) – German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has expressed shock after at least four people were killed and 30 more were injured Friday when a regional passenger train derailed in Bavaria’s alpine southern German state. He said his “sympathy was with families of the victims.”
The incident happened while the double-decker train, traveling on a regional service from the picturesque resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Munich, derailed on an elevated section of track near the municipality of Burgrain, according to police. Three carriages ended up on their sides in a brook next to the rail tracks. Many of the victims had to be lifted upwards through broken windows.
Around 140 passengers were on board during the accident, and some 15 people were rushed to hospital with severe injuries, authorities said. Police explained that a major operation to free people from the wreckage had been completed. “As far as we can tell, all the people have been rescued from the train,” explained Stefan Sonntag, a spokesperson for the German federal police.
It was unclear what caused the accident while the train rounded a wide bend. But Bavaria’s transport minister, Christian Bernreiter, told regional broadcaster BR that the accident may have resulted from a technical fault. “There were no third parties involved here, so one must assume that some technical reason – either on the vehicle or the rail – was the cause,” he added.
Germany, Europe’s largest economy, has a busy railway network. The nation’s deadliest rail crash in modern times occurred in 1998 when a high-speed train derailed in Eschede in Lower Saxony, killing 101 people. The country’s most recent fatal crash happened in February when one person was killed, and 14 others were injured in a collision between two trains near Munich.
Elsewhere in Europe, a carriage on an Italian high-speed train traveling from Turin to Rome derailed while approaching the capital. However local emergency officials said nobody was injured in the incident, which saw the train’s back carriage come off the tracks as it neared the Serenissima tunnel in Rome, the capital.
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