After fatal train accident in Bavaria: acquittal for railway employees after train accident near Burgrain

It was the last day of school before the Whitsun holidays when a regional train with many children on board crashed in Burgrain, Bavaria, over three years ago. Five people died and 72 were injured. The Munich II Regional Court has now convicted the defendants Andreas M. and Manfred Sch. acquitted on Monday. The court did not see any legally punishable behavior on their part.

The derailment caused so-called concrete cancer. This is what it is according to a report the Federal Bureau of Railway Accident Investigation (BEU) about rusting steel that is built into the sleepers and damages the concrete. The rails rest on these sleepers. The regional train entered a left-hand bend at over 90 kilometers per hour, swerved and derailed.

A spokeswoman for Deutsche Bahn told the taz that stricter criteria now apply for classifying defective sleepers. The DB replaces all potentially risky track documents. “A large part has already been removed – around two million concrete sleepers to date.”

Despite structural deficiencies in the Deutsche Bahn route network, the public prosecutor saw the two railway employees responsible because the dispatcher M. received a warning on the evening before the accident. Be on the route section “There’s a sway in there somewhere, so the train is really bouncing, so someone should look at it somehow.”. M. did not pass on the report. Public Prosecutor II accused the defendant of “failure to act in the moment”. She asked for a year of probation.

The district manager Sch. is said to have repeatedly postponed and delayed repairs to the threshold. The public prosecutor’s office cited “repeated and systematic failure” and called for two years of probation.

M’s defense, however, questioned whether passing on the warning directly would have prevented the accident. In both cases the defense had demanded acquittal. The court has now followed this.