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Mechanical Issues Cited in French Train Derailment
Switching Equipment Cited in French Train Derailment
(about 1 hour later)
BRÉTIGNY-SUR-ORGE, France — Mechanical problems may have been the cause of Friday’s fatal train derailment outside of Paris, France’s transportation minister said Saturday.
PARIS — A rail joint that worked loose from a track switching point appears to have caused France’s worst train accident in years, said Pierre Izard, an official with the national rail company, SNCF, on Saturday.
A crowded passenger train derailed at a station here, killing at least six people and injuring dozens of others. It was the country’s worst train accident in 25 years.
The crowded intercity train, leaving Paris at rush hour before a holiday weekend for the city of Limoges, jumped the tracks 20 miles south at the station of Brétigny-sur-Orge. The seven-car train split into two, with some cars riding up the station platform and flipping over.
The train, heading to Limoges from Paris, derailed about 20 miles south of Paris and split in two. Witnesses said the intercity train — not one of France’s TGV high-speed services — had appeared to be going unusually fast and veered off the track as it entered the station, where it was not scheduled to stop. Cars smashed into one another, and some overturned.
Six people died, while two more were in critical condition and seven more in serious condition, officials said on Saturday, with another 21 still in the hospital. More than 190 people were treated at the scene for lesser injuries as the emergency services responded quickly.
On Friday night, the Interior Ministry confirmed that a dozen people had been seriously hurt. Nine of them were in critical condition, 22 had significant injuries and more than 200 were treated by emergency personnel.
Officials said the death toll may increase as the wreckage is removed because some people may be beneath the overturned cars.
Frederic Cuvillier, the transportation minister, said Saturday that a mechanical problem, and not human error, was likely the cause of the derailment, and investigators were looking at possible problems with the switching system as well as other possibilities.
Railway investigators discovered that a metal clip joining two rails as part of the switch, which guides trains from one track to another, had worked loose and disconnected from its normal position, said Mr. Izard, the SNCF’s director for infrastructure.
Guillaume Pepy, the president of the French national railway company, SNCF, said at least 370 people were on the train, many of them heading home for a holiday weekend or to central France for summer vacations. The national holiday of Bastille Day is on Sunday.
“It broke away, became detached and came out of its housing,” he said at a news conference at the scene. “It moved into the center of the switch, and in this position it prevented the normal passage of the train’s wheels and seems to have caused the derailment.”
The train’s third and fourth cars derailed first, then knocked four other cars off the track, Mr. Pepy told reporters, his voice breaking. “Some cars simply derailed, others are leaning, others fell over,” he said. But he said there was no immediately obvious cause for the derailment.
The president of SNCF, Guillaume Pepy, said engineers would immediately check the condition of 5,000 similar switches along the rail network.
The accident took place at 5:14 p.m., the SNCF said, 21 minutes after the train, Intercités No. 3657, left the Paris station of Gare d’Austerlitz. Some people were still trapped in the train more than two hours later, Mr. Pepy said.
President François Hollande and Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault went to Brétigny-sur-Orge on Friday evening to comfort victims and their families and to thank rescue workers. They promised a full investigation.
Television images showed one of the carriages smashed against a platform at Brétigny-sur-Orge station as rescue workers helped passengers to safety.
The first two cars of the train seemed to have passed along the tracks without difficulty, but the third car was the first to derail some 200 yards before the station itself. The train had left Paris 21 minutes before, packed with some 385 people, and was not scheduled to stop at the station.
One passenger, Marc Cheutin, 57, told Agence France-Presse that he had to “step over a decapitated person” to exit the carriage he had been traveling in. “Shortly after departure, just as I was getting into my book, we felt a first shock that shook the carriage I was in,” he said. “Then there was a second shock, and the carriage lifted up, then a third and a fourth, and the carriage went over on its side.”
Officials said that work had been performed this month on the tracks, which are shared with the heavily used suburban railway line, the RER C, which carries an average of 540,000 people a day. The switch was last inspected on July 4, railway officials said, and another train had passed safely over the same tracks a half-hour before.
Vianey Kalisa, 30, who was waiting at the station for a train into Paris, told the news agency, “I saw many wounded, women and children trapped in the interior.”
The minister of transport, Frédéric Cuvillier, said on Saturday that he believed the fault was mechanical, not human. He praised the driver of the train for acting quickly to sound an alarm, preventing a collision with another train. He said that the train was traveling at about 85 miles per hour, under the speed limit of 93 miles per hour.
“I trembled like a child,” he said. “People cried. A man’s face was covered in blood. These are the images of war. I’ll never forget it.”
Mr. Cuvillier said that there was no indication for the moment that lack of investment in maintaining the system’s infrastructure was at fault. But he said France’s regional rail lines were out of date, since the SNCF had focused so much attention on its high-speed TGV lines, one of France’s prides.
Bernard Villaret, 65, an engineer on another train stopped opposite the crash, said, “We saw people with bloodstains on their clothes, people who got out of the train with wounds still bleeding and scratches. They were pale and slightly crazed.”
“We cannot be satisfied with rolling stock that is 30 years old,” Mr. Cuvillier said, adding: “The situation is severe, with the deterioration in recent years of traditional lines because of a lack of resources.”
But he was impressed by the atmosphere, he said. “You could see that those people were resisting as much as they could; they didn’t panic.”
A minute of silence was held at noon on all French trains and in all stations for the victims of the accident.
Mayor Bernard Decaux told the newspaper Le Parisien that there was chaos at the station after the accident. “Everyone is running in every direction,” he said. “It is an apocalyptic scene. We are trying to organize things.”
The six dead include four men and two women, between ages 19 and 82, the police said, without providing names.
He said three cars had smashed into one another, while another was lying on its side nearby, its top split open. Photographs of the scene showed that one car had mounted the passenger platform, dislodging part of the roof.
The accident is the worst since 2008, when seven students died after a train hit a school bus. The worst rail disaster in 25 years took place on June 27, 1988, when the collision of two commuter trains on underground lines from Gare de Lyon in Paris killed 56 people.
Dozens of emergency and police vehicles rushed to the scene, and hospitals in the southern Paris region were put on alert.
Rail traffic remained disrupted over the weekend, with the national holiday, Bastille Day, on Sunday.
President François Hollande headed to the scene when the seriousness of the accident became clear. He promised a thorough investigation.
“A catastrophe has taken place,” he told reporters at the scene, adding that the station would be closed for three days.
Jérôme Guedj, the president of the local council, told reporters that the crash scene had moved him, to see “this train cut in half and the carriages torn to bits, the violence of the crash.”
The train was traveling on part of the track used by the suburban railway, the RER C, which is used heavily and has needed much recent repair work to try to eliminate commuter delays into Paris.
The derailment was France’s worst rail accident since a commuter train crashed into a stationary train at the Gare de Lyon terminal in Paris in 1988, killing 56 people.
Maïa de la Baume reported from Brétigny-sur-Orge, and Steven Erlanger from Paris.
