German ICE derailment

On Saturday, April 26, southbound ICE 885 derailed within the Landrücken tunnel on the Fulda-Würzburg high speed corridor. The train, which was carrying 135 passengers, was travelling at over 200 km/h or 124 mph, when it ran into a herd of sheep which had escaped from an adjoining pasture and wandered into the tunnel portal. Ten of the twelve self-propelled cars including the front cab derailed. Nineteen passengers were injured, 4 seriously. DB officials stated that it was a stroke of good luck for the passengers that the train derailed while entering the tunnel, as the train scraped along the right-hand side of the tunnel, remaining aligned parallel to the track as opposed to jack-knifing into one another.

The tunnel wall and roadbed were both seriously damaged, although no major structural damage was done to the tunnel. High speed passenger trains are being detoured, adding 40 minutes delay to the Hamburg-Munich journey as well as delaying local passenger and freight trains on the alternate route, which was already operating at near capacity. If you can read German, here is a link to the news story:

http://www.focus.de/panorama/diverses/zugunglueck-ice-entgleist-im-landrueckentunnel_aid_297938.html

wow…must be some sheep they bread over there to derail a train going at almost 130mph… would think it would just vaporize them as it hit them at that speed…

csx engineer

Maybe they should try a sheep-catcher on the front of the loco…[;)]

Glad nobody was killed. Here is a translation of that page, kinda poor translation I might add, into English.

The engineer’s name wasn’t Quixote, by chance?

I suspect that the ICE train is considerably lighter than anything we run this side of the puddle, and that the train derailed over lamb chops (ewe!) caught between the roadbed and the cars. Sorry to be making light of what had to have been a wild and wooly experience.

Indeed Carl. It sounded pretty ba-a-a-a-d.