Looks like a communication breakdown lead to a head on collision with a maintanence vehicle. At least one dead, undetermined injuries…
text from story:
By IMKE ZIMMERMANN, Associated Press Writer 11 minutes ago
LATHEN, Germany - A high-speed magnetic train traveling at 125 mph crashed in northwestern Germany on Friday, killing at least one of the 29 people aboard and injuring others in the first fatal wreck involving the high-tech system. A town councilman said the number of fatalities would rise.
Trains using maglev technology can reach 270 mph, but it was not immediately clear how fast the train was traveling. One such train in Shanghai caught fire last month.
Most of the 29 people were in the front of the train when it crashed head-on with a maintenance vehicle on the elevated track.
Video showed the front end of the train as a mangled mess of metal. Rescue workers used fire trucks to reach the track, which is more than 13 feet high.
Rudolf Schwarz, a spokesman for the company that oversees the test track, said there were no tourists aboard the trai
How the hell did the maintenance trolley get on teh guideway while the train was running??
The switches involve moving the whole guideway, so it couldn’t have just run through it.
There’ll be hell to pay over this.
Updated from the timesonline out of the UK. 15 now confirmed dead, with at least six missing and feared dead. as was described in Vic’s post what I find particularly scary was that one of the cars was actually dangling about 13 feet off the ground. I guess that is an inherent danger with an elevated system. My condolences to the families.
From the railroading stand point, do you folks think this will be a bit of a set back to mag-lev in Europe despite being operator error? I hope not.
Of 29 people in the train and two in the service car, 23 are definitely dead.
Most of the passengers in the train were members of the RWE workers council, which made an excursion. Beside test runs, the transrapid is often used for excursions, by school classes, students and other groups. Unbeliveable what would have happened, if a school class had been in the train.
Well, the maglev was till today the safest kind of “railroad”. Actually, this accident was caused by human errors, but i don´t know as this test line will go back to service. Many experts don´t see any future for Maglev projects in Germany…
Its hard to say what this will hold for the future of the technology. Trouble is that the system is so high technology oriented and the costs involved -vs- a “regular” HST system which for all its own high tech aspects is still basicly a dumb train, albiet a very fast dumb train. The level of technical sophistication and maintanence needed for the Maglev is a major step up from the relativly traditional rail systems still used by HST systems around the world. To me the Mag Lev is the Concorde of airlines. The Concorde looked great, was really cool to see flying, but high purchase price and high operational costs (more so than noise issues) ultimitly doomed it when no airlines bought it, it stayed in the air as long as it did only by filling a very narrow niche market and with government support that was based more on National pride than anything else.
It’s hard to say what’ll happen to the technology.
This type of accident can happen on any guided transport mode. Maintenance trolleys don’t always activate track circuits, and if a railway uses axle counters instead it wouldn’t be any different.
The actual amount of killed passengers now stands at 23.
The Maglev was advertized as not being able to have collisions something now proven wrong, even on a track with only one available train.
This may very well be the end of Maglev as viable mode of transportation.
30 years of testing and only one sale (china)
I think you’re forgetting that thanks to improvements in rail technology in the past 20 years conventional steel-wheel passenger trains are already pushing the 330 km/h (205 mph) cruise speed limits safely in Germany, Japan and France. That makes maglevs less attractive economically. We’re already getting 300 km/h (186 mph) cruise speeds for over a decade; in France, that’s common on their TGV lines and the Eurostar line on the Continent side.
Emsland disaster shatters maglev dream
Railway Gazette International
01 October 2006
ON THE MORNING of September 22 the three-section TR08 Transrapid maglev
vehicle collided at around 180 km/h with a guideway mainte-nance vehicle at
the Emsland test facility near Lathen in north Germany. Altogether 23 people
were killed and 10 injured, some of them seriously - early reports indicated
that 31 people were on board and that two staff were at work on the
maintenance vehicle.
While the accident does not call into question the technical principle of
magnetic levitation, it raises fundamental issues about Transrapid’s
operational practicalities and safety measures. Conventional railways are by
no means immune from accidents, but operations at the 31·5 km Emsland test
guideway appear to have relied on primitive safety procedures.
The calamity apparently happened because the operator in the control centre
was unaware that the rubber-tyred maintenance vehicle was out on the
elevated guideway. Reports suggested that control centre staff were required
to make a simple visual check that the diesel-powered maintenance vehicle
was safely in its berth near the control centre before authorising a test
run with the maglev vehicle, there being no back-up system or device to
indicate the maintenance vehicle’s location - although this basic safety
weakness has been rectified on China’s 31 km Transrapid line which has been
carrying fare-paying passengers between Pudong and Shanghai Airport since
January 2004.
On September 23 Osnabrück public prosecutor Alexander Retemeyer indicated
that human error was likely to be the cause of the collision, commenting
that ‘we must assume there were relatively few technical safety measures’.
That the vehicle was apparently out clearing twigs and branches from the
guideway surface highlights the vulnerability of maglev to any obstacle. As
the Transrapid designers were confident that a collision
No matter how cutting edge a technology appears to be on the surface, and perhaps even more in this incident, the situation strikes me as emblematic of human error always lurking in the background. It is a strange recurrence of a tragic, “impossible” accident that happened in 1941. The Indiana Railroad was down to one interurban car running at a time, on single round trip per day. There was a dewirement, and when it was reported, someone misunderstood the report and thought the car needed assistance, when, in fact, it was proceeding on it’s way. A line car was sent. They met head on, in the midst of a blind curve…