German railways are going through a crisis with the national operator, Deutsche Bahn reporting a spike in serious and fatal accidents.
The latest incident involved a high-speed train and a regional train occurred in southern Germany on Friday, resulting in several minor injuries.
Police reported a “lateral contact” between the high-speed ICE train and the regional service at Reichertshausen, located between Ingolstadt and Munich, on X.
Back in September another train crash near Paderborn in North Rhine-Westphalia, resulted in the death of a young train driver.
The Paderborn incident marked the ninth fatal accident this year, a significant increase compared to previous years.
This week a social media user highlighted that “Germany has gone from one serious accident per month to one per week.”
Between January and July 2023, a number of deadly incidents involving railway workers were recorded in Germany.
On January 16, a train collided with two workers on the Nuremberg-Regensburg line, killing one and seriously injuring the other.
On February 4, a worker died at Bebra station, and on February 23, a 56-year-old excavator operator died in Bremerhaven.
Only two months later an intercity train collided with and killed two track workers near Cologne.
Markus Hecht, a rail specialist and the head of the Rail Vehicles department at the Technical University of Berlin, is calling for extra safeguards against train collisions in Germany, proposing the implementation of a particular kind of “derailment switch,” not yet sanctioned in the country.
Meawhile leftwing politicians and rail union officials have blamed costing-cutting and profiteering as the reason behind the rise in workplace accidents, Ulrich Rippert of the Socialist Equality Party demanded back in september that “workers’ health must take priority over profits”.
