High speed train crash kills 23

BERLIN - Germany's prestigious Transrapid high speed magnetic train ploughed into a maintenance wagon on a test track in the northwest of the country yesterday, killing 23 passengers and injuring ten others in the worst accident in the vehicle's 35-year history.

Police said the Transrapid, which floats on a monorail through a magnetic levitation system, was travelling at almost 200km/h when it crashed, catapulting many of the passengers through the front panorama windows of the driverless train and causing two fires to break out immediately.

Local officials in Emsland, the district in which the 30km test track is located said late yesterday that one body had been recovered from the wreckage. Most of the victims' bodies were thought to be buried under the train's smashed front section.

Television pictures of the scene showed fire crews battling to enter smashed carriages that were balanced on a section of track raised some five metres off the ground.

Sections of the train's wreckage littered the area and ambulances were busy ferrying the injured to hospital in the surrounding area.

One witness told Germany's N24 television channel that the train rammed the maintenance wagon, pushing it more than 600m down the track before coming to a halt.

"As soon as the train stopped, fires broke out. The front of the train was completely destroyed," he said.

Rudolf Schwarz, of the IABG company which runs the test track, said human error appeared to have caused the crash: "We are absolutely devastated by what has happened and we will be doing everything possible to find out exactly what caused the crash," he said.

Some reports said the dead included relatives of the Transrapid test track's employees who had been invited to go on a company sponsored ride on the train.

More than 250,000 passengers have used the train since it was set up as a tourist attraction and a testing site in 1989.

News of the crash prompted Wolfgang Tiefensee, the German Transport Minister to break off a visit to China yesterday. His ministry said he was "deeply concerned" and was making straight for the scene to console relatives of the dead and injured.

The incident was expected to deal a serious blow to Germany's hopes of fully developing the Transrapid as a viable form of rail transport at home and as an export.

The train, which is capable of speeds exceeding 450km/h, only operates commercially in China where it provides a link between Shanghai airport and the city's centre.

It will also, however, have ramifications closer to home, as the idea of introducing the high-speed 'maglev' trains to Britain has been championed vociferously by the Conservative party.

Last month the shadow chancellor George Osborne, while on a visit to Japan, warned that the UK was lagging behind other countries' high-technology transport links, saying: "Part of competing means having a transport system that was not built in the 19th century but is actually suitable to the age in which we're living." Last month a fire broke out on one of Shanghai's Transrapid trains, raising concerns about their safety.

Technology for the Transrapid was first developed in Germany in 1934 but the country's first magnetic levitation train was only built as a prototype in 1971.

Its developers, Tranrapid International - a joint venture involving Siemens and Thyssen Krupp- had promoted the Transrapid as a train whose performance more than equalled that of France's now legendary TGV.

However attempts in the early 1990s to provide a 290km Transrapid rail link between Berlin and the port city of Hamburg, were suspended following protests by the Greens party which claimed that the train was noisy, used too much energy and was potentially unsafe.

Opposition to the project led the partially state-owned German rail network Deutsche Bahn to invest millions in the development of a conventional high-speed rail service between the cities.

Germany currently has plans to develop the Transrapid as a rail link between Munich and the city's airport, some 30km to the north.

- INDEPENDENT