Seconds from disaster Wreck high speed S01E05 Derailment at Eschede
Intercity-Express trainset 51 was traveling as ICE 884 Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen Munich to Hamburg Road; the train had to stop in Augsburg Nuremberg Wurzburg Fulda Kassel Göttingen and Hanover before arriving in Hamburg 1 After stopping 10 Hanover 30, the train continued its journey north about 130 kilometers 80 mph and forty minutes from Hamburg 1 both necessary and six kilometers south central Eschede near Celle tire steel on a wheel on the third axis of the first car broken, peeled from the wheel, and punctured the floor of the car, where it remained citation embedded necessary.
There followed a series of events that occurred within minutes still took months for investigators to reconstruct the onboard tire in the passenger car was seen by Jörg Dittmann, one of the bus passengers 1 the tire went through an armrest between where sat his wife and son Dittmann took his wife and son of the damaged coach and went to inform a driver in the third coach driver, who noticed vibrations in the train, said Dittmann that company policy required him to investigate the circumstances before pulling the emergency brake the driver a minute to go on the site Coach 1 According Dittmann, the train began to swing from one side to the other when the driver has not shown a willingness to stop the train immediately at that time and wanted to investigate more thoroughly the incident accident occurred just when Dittmann would show the puncture of the armrest to the driver one time.
When the train passes on the first two points of the onboard tire slammed against the guide rail points, firing sleepers This guide rail also pierced the floor of the car, be embedded in the vehicle and lifting the carriage axle off the rails in October 59 local time August 59 UTC, one of the now derailed wheels then struck the leverage points of the second switch, setting changing the rear axle of the car number 3 went on a parallel track, and whole car was thus thrown into the pillars supporting a bridge on road 300 tons of destroying them.
Car number 4, also derailed by the violent-gap in the number of cars 3 and still traveling 200 km / h 125 mph passed intact under the bridge and rolled down the embankment immediately behind it, hitting several trees before coming to a stop two Deutsche Bahn railway workers working near the bridge were killed instantly when the car derailed crushed them breaking car fittings caused the automatic emergency brakes engage and the first three cars in most good condition came to a stop before the electric car detached came to a stop after spending the Eschede train station, three kilometers further two miles along the track.
The electric car before and one and two coaches crossed the bridge three coach hit the deck, which began to collapse four coach crossed the bridge, away from the track and hit a group of trees bridge pieces crushed the back half of the restaurant five coach coach, six, was crushed to 15 cm in height with 6 now track completely obstructed by the collapsed bridge remaining cars jackknife in the rubble in a zigzag cars 7, the service car, the three of first numbered class cars 10 to 12, and the rear electric car derailed and slammed into the cell 1 when needed the resulting disorder was compared to a partially collapsed folding rule an automobile also was found in the wreckage He belonged to two train technicians and was probably parked on the bridge before the accident one time.
Electric car before 401,051 in Munich in August 2007, before the electric car partially derailed continued down the runway until it stopped a short distance after the station Eschede Having suffered only minor damage, it was repaired and back in service.
The accident produced a noise that witnesses later described as surprising, horribly strong, and as a plane crash nearby residents, alerted by the noise, were the first to arrive on the scene Erika Karl, the first person to enter the scene of the accident, photographed the site of the accident, Karl said after hearing the noise, her husband initially thought the accident was a plane crash after the accident, eight of ICE carriages occupied a slightly longer than the length of a single trolley 1 time required area.
At 11 02, the local police declared an emergency; 07 to 11, as the scale of the disaster soon became apparent, it was raised to great urgency; and on December 30 the government of Celle district said Vital catastrophic emergency More than 1,000 emergency relief workers of the regional emergency services, fire services, rescue services, the police and army were dispatched Some 37 emergency doctors who were attending a professional conference in the nearby city of Hanover has also provided assistance during the early hours of the rescue effort, as well as units of British forces in Germany.
While the driver and several passengers in the front part of the train survived with minor to moderate injuries, there was little chance of survival for people in the rear car, which struck the concrete bridge pier to speed of 200 km h 120 mph including the two railway workers who had been standing under the bridge, 101 people died ICE 787 had passed under the bridge going in the opposite direction to Hamburg route Hanover just two minutes earlier.
By 13 45 authorities gave emergency treatment to 87 people 27 of the most severely injured passengers were airlifted to the hospital one time.
Remains of a VW Golf Variant, from both railway workers killed in the accident, were found under the rubble of crushed ice first media speculated that the train derailed after colliding with the car, 2 a circumstance which caused jackknife train at the railway accident Ufton Nervet six years later; However, this theory was quickly dismissed as the electric car front has not received any damage at all, having continued to coast on the track until it passes the next station.
The ICE 1 trains were initially fitted with single wheels cast called monobloc wheels Once operational, it soon became apparent that this design could, due to metal fatigue and excluding any circumstances, cause resonance and vibration at speed cruise passengers have noticed this particularly in the restaurant car, where there were reports of strong vibrations in the dishes and creeping glasses on the tables.
The organization of railway managers have experienced strong vibrations on a trip and asked to have the issue resolved in response engineers decided that to solve the problem, ICE cars of the suspension could be improved with the use of a rubber damping ring between Rail-setting vacuum contact steel and steel wheel body a similar design has been successfully used in trams called elastic wheels at significantly lower speeds This new wheel, coupled with a pneumatic wheel design, consisting of a wheel body surrounded by a rubber damper 20 mm thick and a relatively thin metal tire the new design has not been tested before high speed it is made operational, but managed to solve the problem of vibrations at cruising speeds.
At the time, no facilities existed in Germany which could test the actual failure limit of the wheels, and so complete prototypes were never tested physical citation needed The design and specification drew extensively on materials available data and theory the very few laboratory tests and track that were conducted did not measure the behavior of the wheels with extended wear conditions or speeds above normal cruising However, over a period of years, the wheels have proven reliable and apparently, until the accident has not caused major problems.
In July 1997, nearly a year before the disaster, Üstra the company that operates the Hanover tram network, found fatigue cracks in the double-block wheels on trams operating at about 24 km h 15 mph He started changing the front wheels fatigue cracks could develop much earlier than was legally required by the specification Üstra reported its findings in a warning to all other users wheels built with similar models, including Deutsche Bahn at the end of 1997 According Üstra Deutsche Bahn responded by saying that they had not noticed problems in their trains 1 the necessary time.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and Reliability LBF in Darmstadt system has been charged with the task of determining the cause of the accident, it was later revealed that the institute had told the management DB, since 1992, about his concerns about the wheel-tire failure.
It quickly became apparent that dynamic repetitive forces had not been taken into account in modeling the statistical failure is during the design phase, and the resulting design lacked a sufficient margin of safety The following factors, neglected during design, were noted.
The tires were flattened into an ellipse as the wheel turned through each revolution about 500 000 times during a typical day in service on an ICE train, with corresponding fatigue effects.
Unlike the design of the monobloc wheels, cracks may also form inside of the tire.
As the tire became due to wear thinner, dynamic forces were exaggerated, resulting in crack growth.
Lands and ridges or swells in the tire has dramatically increased the dynamic forces on the assembly and wear greatly accelerated.
Failing to stop the train allowed the wheel to disintegrate, causing a series of catastrophic events if the train had been stopped immediately, it is unlikely that subsequent events have occurred.
Precious time was lost when Dittmann tried to warn the train crew on the large piece of metal coming through the floor, instead of shooting himself emergency brake The conductor refused to stop the train until he had investigated itself the problem, saying it was company policy this decision was upheld in court, absolving him of all the charges conductor since that he was a customer service employee and not a maintainer of train or engineer, he has no more authority to make an engineering judgment as to whether or not to stop the train as passengers anyway .
About the time of the disaster, the technicians of the maintenance factory of Deutsche Bahn in Munich used standard flashlights for visual inspection of the tires instead of metal fatigue detection equipment 3 Previously, advanced test machines were used; However, as the equipment has generated many false positive error messages, it was considered unreliable, and its use was discontinued during the week preceding the Eschede disaster, three separate automated checks indicated that the wheel was defective investigators found, from a maintenance report generated by the train's onboard computer, two months before the Eschede disaster, drivers and other members of the train crew filed eight separate complaints about noise and vibration generated by the bogie with the defective wheel; the company has not replaced the wheel Deutsche Bahn said its inspections were appropriate at the time and that engineers could not predict the rupture of the wheel one time.
The overbridge design may also have contributed to the accident because it had two thin pillars holding the bridge on each side instead of the spans from solid pillars to the solid pillars Granville rail disaster of 1977 had a similar weakness in its bridge deck built after the disaster is a cantilever design and does not have this vulnerability, however, although it is practical to mandate that new bridges should be designed to resist collapse on impact, it would questionable feasibility of mandating the replacement of all existing bridges with the old design.
Another factor is the use of welds in the carriage body which decompressed when overwriting 4.
In summary, although the elastic wheel disintegrated was the cause of the accident, the damage was as severe as it was due to a number of factors, including the proximity of the bridge and the turning point, and the position wheel front -end the process leading to a large number of cars derailed.
Derailment Eschede, Eschede, derailment, bridge people died before the disaster Eschede.