A year after the train accident near Garmisch-Partenkirchen with five dead and many injured, there is now official, albeit preliminary, information about what led to the accident. A “defect in the superstructure” was “primarily the cause”, i.e. a major reason why a regional train derailed at the time. This explains the Federal Office for Railway Accident Investigation (BEU) in a now published interim report. The Federal Office classifies this deficiency as “security problems”.
The report is brief and leads to a trail that has already been followed by the authorities and also by Deutsche Bahn (DB) itself. The prestressed concrete sleepers laid at the accident site were said to be defective. That led to a “failure of the structure,” according to the very technical interim report. In other words, the sleepers would no longer have held the rails together. The regional train that was traveling from Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Munich derailed. Several cars fell down the railway embankment in Burgrain.
Despite the interim report that is now available, the question of guilt remains unresolved. The federal agency expressly points out that its own investigations were not intended to “determine fault”. It is also not the task of the federal agency to clarify who is liable for the accident and its consequences. The federal agency, which is assigned to the Federal Ministry of Transport, claims to be an “independent agency” for investigating “dangerous events in railway operations”. The findings should serve to improve safety on the railway. The interim report reflects “what is currently secured,” said a spokesman for the federal agency. “The investigations into the cause of the accident are much more extensive and ongoing.”
The interim result that is now available could lead to the investigations by the Munich II public prosecutor and Deutsche Bahn itself concentrating on how the defect in the superstructure, i.e. the track body, could have come about. Was the inspection and maintenance of the sleepers sloppy? Or was the damage simply not recognizable? Is the manufacturer of the sleepers to blame?
Sleepers are being replaced everywhere in Germany. Here the railroad conversion train is on the move on the train route near Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
(Photo: Angelika Warmuth/dpa)
Since the accident, Deutsche Bahn has replaced several hundred thousand sleepers nationwide to prevent further accidents. Several hundred construction sites are the result, which leads to even more train cancellations and delays than is already the case with the railways. The motto is: Safety first.
The public prosecutor’s office in Munich II has received three reports that it had commissioned. One of the reports states that a softened railway embankment could also have contributed to the accident. The public prosecutor’s office commissioned a kind of general report months ago, which is intended to summarize the results of the three individual reports. However, this review is not finished yet.
As long as this is not the case, the public prosecutor’s office will continue to investigate the four previous suspects; all employees of the railway. There are two dispatchers, the driver of the derailed train and a person responsible for the route network. The interim report that has now been published should relieve the burden on the engine driver and the dispatcher, provided they were not aware of any specific superstructure defects at this point. And it must be clarified with the person responsible for the route whether he could have known about the defects and whether the railway had employed enough staff for the maintenance.
The state-owned company Bahn itself is now dealing with the accident in a completely different way and is now also looking for mistakes in itself. The state-owned company turned on the law firm Gleiss Lutz in March 2023. The law firm is to investigate in parallel with the investigating authorities what led to the accident. And according to the railways, “clarify in particular whether the train accident is related to possible internal omissions”.
“The stairs are swept from above,” says the railway
That sounds very different now than in the first few months after the accident. At that time, the railways primarily blamed a Munich company that manufactured the concrete sleepers that were laid at the scene of the accident. Deutsche Bahn stated in August 2022 that “possible recourse claims against the sleeper manufacturer” were being examined and that damage in the hundreds of millions was assumed; i.e. more than 100 million euros.
In November 2022, at the request of the SZ, Deutsche Bahn announced that investigations and reports it had commissioned suggested that there could be a “manufacturing error”. “In particular, a type of rock that was used to produce the concrete sleeper could be one of the causes of the damage.” The railway denied its own mistakes and omissions in the maintenance of the route. The rails and sleepers are regularly inspected “in order to identify and repair possible damage at an early stage”. There are strict regulations and “prescribed deadlines” for this, which the Federal Railway Authority, as the responsible supervisory authority, monitors.
Accordingly, everything would have been fine with the railway itself. However, this view is no longer valid. In the meantime, the railway has not only commissioned the investigation from Gleiss Lutz. But in March 2023 they also decided to tighten their own rules for the inspection and monitoring of concrete sleepers. The new procedure has, as can be heard from the railways, mainly to do with the new management of the rail network. Berthold Huber is now responsible for the railway infrastructure on the Group Board of Management. There are also new people at work on the board of the network division, DB Netz AG. Internally, Huber and his people issued the slogan that everything that was a problem had to be brought up on the table.
“The stairs are swept from above,” says the railway. The rail network had been neglected for decades both within the company and by previous federal governments. Many tracks, points, bridges and signal boxes are outdated; the need for rehabilitation is immense. Deutsche Bahn now wants to clarify whether this contributed to the train accident near Garmisch-Partenkirchen.