Around 7.30 am on Friday morning, a De Lijn bus crossed a level crossing in Zedelgem in West Flanders, but broke down right on the tracks. Attempts by the driver to get his vehicle running again were fruitless. The man then decided to send all his passengers – about twenty children – off the bus. Not much later it was hit by a train, causing enormous damage.
“A catastrophe has been avoided here,” said Mayor of Zedelgem Annick Vermeulen. One or two occupants of the bus were slightly injured. Apart from one person on the train, who was taken to hospital in shock, everyone on the train was unharmed.
Train traffic between Lichtervelde and Bruges may remain at a standstill all day. “The train left the tracks with its front axle,” says NMBS spokesperson Bart Crols. “It must first be put back on those tracks, and then it will be towed away.” The impact of this can also be felt in the rest of the country.
Vulnerable as a bell
Not only West Flemish commuters experienced inconvenience on the railways on Friday morning. There were outages across the country. These were mainly due to “winter conditions” in the south of the country, says Crols. “The cold has an impact on our equipment. Just like cars, trains are more difficult to start or even impossible to start when it is frozen. Frozen points also caused problems here and there.”
The Belgian rail network – in contrast to the diamond in the Netherlands – is shaped like a star. Brussels is the core. Everything is connected to everything else and that makes it “as sensitive as the mechanism of a clock”, as is said within the NMBS. As a result, some trains with starting problems in Wallonia can quickly have consequences throughout the country. “We do everything we can to prevent that,” says Crols.
To top it all off, there were also rail runners in Ghent, in full morning rush hour, and “technical problems” on the NMBS app and website.
(Jef Poppelmonde, Junior Verbeeke, mtm)
