GERMAN INVESTIGATORS worked through the night to clarify how two trains came to collide at high speed near Magdeburg on Saturday night, killing 10 and injuring 23.
A cargo train crashed into a half-full regional train carrying 50 tourists and teenage party-goers at about 10.30pm in heavy fog.
The two trains were travelling on a single-track rail line through the rural village of Hordorf, near Halberstadt, in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.
Among the victims of Germany’s worst train accident in a decade were the driver and conductor of the regional train as well as eight passengers, including Georgian, Brazilian and Portuguese nationals.
The driver of the cargo train was in shock, though only lightly injured, and was questioned by police last night in hospital, where several passengers remained in a critical condition.
The impact left the two trains parallel with each other at the accident scene: the cargo train with its hulking iron wagons filled with chalk came to a halt only several hundred metres beyond the point of impact.
Lying adjacent on its side was the mangled mess of blue, white and yellow metal of the “Georg Friedrich Händel” train operated by private company Veolia.
So violent was the impact of the collision that the front of the diesel-driven passenger train was compressed to the fourth row of windows. Police said any passengers sitting in the first rows had no chance of survival.
Beside the metal wreck, groceries were strewn across the frosted ground; crash scene images showed a puddle filled with blood beneath the crumpled carriage.
Only the two regional train employees were identified by yesterday evening; police said their work was complicated by the fact that many passengers were carrying no identification.
German rail investigators refused to comment on the cause of the accident, in particular whether it was due to a technical fault or human error, though they conceded that the single-track stretch was not equipped with an automatic braking system to prevent collisions.
Such a system, due to be installed later this year on the track, is not obligatory on German single-track stretches, meaning drivers are dependent on visual signals.
In the heavy fog of Saturday evening, locals speculated that one of the two drivers overlooked or was unable to see the red signal light along the track.
“We’re all deeply affected by the accident right into our bone marrow,” said local police officer Ralph Krüger. “But the high number of dead motivates us to clarify what happened.” Locals reported hearing a loud bang and ventured out to the accident site.
“It looked like a firebomb and sounded like a bomb, that’s how loud it was,” said local man Dirk Sporleder, also a train driver with the same company. He had the evening off and told the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily how he rushed to the scene shortly after the impact to see a dead colleague near the train wreck.
“I just saw her lying there,” said the 49-year-old man.
According to local reports, the Harz-Elbe regional train left Magdeburg as scheduled an hour earlier, the last train of the evening.
At that time on a Saturday evening, locals said the train was filled mostly with young people from the rural villages on their way to discos and pubs in Halberstadt.