Trial in High-Speed Rail Disaster Opens

Just after 11 a.m on June 3, 1998, one of Germany’s modern high-speed trains was flying along the tracks at 200 km/h (120 mph) en route from Munich to Hamburg with some 400 passengers on board.

As it approached the small town of Eschede, 35 miles north of the city of Hanover, something went terribly wrong. A wheel broke on the first passenger car behind the locomotive and it jumped off the tracks, starting a catastrophic chain reaction.

The following cars started flying off the rails at high speed and piling up on one another in concertina fashion. The third wagon hit the central support post of a bridge, bringing the structure down, slicing one car in half and burying several others in a rain of concrete.

In the end, 101 people lost their lives, 105 were injured. It was the worst rail accident in Germany’s post-war history.

Not Enough Testing

After four years of investigation, three men are being brought to court on Wednesday in what is turning out to be one of the most expensive trials Germany has seen.

A state court in the town of Celle in Lower Saxony will decide if two engineers from the German rail system responsible for the safety of the wheel systems along with a technician from the company that manufactured the failed wheel can be held responsible for the accident.

The three are accused of putting the wheel into service before sufficient testing had been carried out.

The state will argue that the orgins of the accident go back to 1991, when German Rail employees are said to have been unhappy with an uncontrolled rattling on the ICE trains. One year later, a new type of wheel, with a rubber strip to reduce vibration, was introduced.

This rubber component on the failed wheel was worn down to 862 millimeters in diameter at the time of the accident, under the lowest limit of 880 millimeters necessary for the wheel to perform safely, according to the prosecution.

If that lower limit had been respected and the engineers on trial had been more careful in the development of the noise-reducing wheel, Eschede would still be a sleepy village in northern Germany, not a synonym for disaster, say prosecutors.

The prosecutors are representing 32 co-plaintiffs, among them relatives of the deceased as well as passengers who sustained serious injuries.

The three men accused have kept silent in the four years since the accident. Only recently through their lawyers have they denied the accusations publicly, saying they did the best they could with the level of technology at the time.

Their defense team is calling on more than 1,000 pages of reports from experts from Switzerland, Sweden, South Africa and Japan who will say the accident could not have been foreseen.

Some 45 witness and 10 experts are expected to be called. At one point, the court is expected to visit the scene of the derailment.

Emotional event

Emotions are expected to run high during the course of the trial. In the wake of the accident, the grief of victims’ relatives was made public in way that had been seldom seen in Germany.

Michael Kaps, attorney for the defendants, is aware of this and says one of his goals is to keep those emotions in check.

“We are very aware that something bad happened here,” he told Reuters. “But this trial is about clarifying the technical questions involved.”

Still, despite all the expected talk about wheel diameters and stress loads, the victims are still at the center of the trail. According to co-plaintiff and speaker of the victims' group, Heinrich Löwen, after four years, it is time they saw justice.

“But that doesn’t mean we want to see long prison terms for these three men,” he said. “Because after all this trial is not going to ease our pain.