Eschede train disaster

Eschede derailment

The destruction of the rear passenger cars
Date	3 June 1998
Time	10:59
Location	Eschede near Celle, Lower Saxony 61 km (38 mi) N from Hanover
Country	Germany
Rail line	Hanover–Hamburg
Operator	Deutsche Bahn AG
Type of incident	Derailment
Cause	Wheel disintegration
Statistics
Trains	1
Passengers	287
Deaths	101
Injuries	88

The Eschede derailment occurred on 3 June 1998, near the village of Eschede in the Celle district of Lower Saxony, Germany, when a high-speed train derailed and crashed into a road bridge. 101 people died and around 100 were injured. It remains the worst rail disaster in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany and the worst high-speed-rail disaster worldwide. The cause was a single fatigue crack in one wheel which, when it failed, caused the train to derail at a set of points.

Intercity-Express trainset 51 was travelling as ICE 884 "Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen" on the Munich to Hamburg route; the train was scheduled to stop at Augsburg, Nürnberg, Würzburg, Fulda, Kassel, Göttingen, and Hanover before reaching Hamburg. After stopping in Hanover at 10:30, the train continued its journey northwards. About 130 kilometres (80 mi) and forty minutes away from Hamburg and six kilometres south of central Eschede, near Celle, the steel tyre on a wheel on the third axle of the first car broke, peeled away from the wheel, and punctured the floor of the car, where it remained embedded.

What ensued was a series of events that occurred within minutes yet took investigators months to reconstruct. The tyre embedded in the rail car was seen by Jörg Dittmann, one of the passengers in Coach 1. The tyre went through an armrest between where his wife and son sat. Dittmann took his wife and son out of the damaged coach and went to inform a conductor in the third coach. The conductor, who noticed vibrations in the train, told Dittmann that company policy required him to investigate the circumstances before pulling the emergency brake. The conductor took one minute to go to the site in Coach 1. According to Dittmann, the train had begun to sway from side to side by then. The conductor did not show a willingness to stop the train immediately at that point and wished to investigate the incident more thoroughly. The crash occurred just when Dittmann was about to show the armrest puncture to the conductor.