“The train which went down was not equipped with the safety system preventing it from going backwards, it is a train which dates from the 2000s and this system did not exist at the time,” declared, on Here Alsacethe general director of the Compagnie des transports strasbourgeois (CTS), Emmanuel Auneau. However, “it is fully compliant and approved to circulate on the network,” he said. The more recent trainsets supplied by the manufacturer Alstom are equipped with this device, he explained. The tram, stopped on an upward slope at the exit of Strasbourg station due to a traffic jam caused by a demonstration, “had to leave again and do a sort of start uphill, which it did not succeed in doing », Detailed the director.
The train then went backwards and violently hit the one following it, stopped at the platform at the underground station of Strasbourg station. But investigators have not yet established why the train went backwards and why the driver was unable to stop it. There was no referral problem, said Emmanuel Auneau. “Neither the emergency brakes nor anything worked, so we have a lot of difficulty understanding what happened,” he said.AFP the president of the CTS, Patrick Maciejewski. The driver of the train went back, physically unharmed but very shocked, has not yet been able to provide details on the circumstances of the accident to her superiors or to investigators, he added.
The driver of the struck train was able to leave the hospital Monday morning, while the CTS set up a psychological unit. Two investigations are underway: one, judicial, for involuntary injuries, aims to establish possible criminal responsibilities; the other, technical, aims to understand how the accident occurred. In this second investigation, experts from the State Land Transport Accident Investigation Bureau (BEATT) “are looking at all the traces that there may be on the rails, on the installations, to try to understand exactly what which happened,” explained Emmanuel Auneau.
“And then, secondly, they will analyze all the technical data that was recorded by the tram – we call it a black box – to find out if the brakes worked well, which button the driver pressed at what time , how the train behaved. The videos recorded by the video surveillance cameras were also recorded by the investigators, said Patrick Maciejewski.
Only investigators currently have access to the station where the accident took place, casting doubt on the date on which tram traffic will be able to resume in the tunnel. But it should remain disrupted at least “until the end of the week,” declared Emmanuel Auneau. “We need the experts, the authorities, to authorize us to enter the tunnel and extract the trains, and then, then, we will have to check the entire tunnel to find out if everything is safe to be able to resume the operation. traffic”. Technicians must present what they know to management and staff representatives on Tuesday morning during a social and economic committee.
Strasbourg is one of the first large French cities to have put a tram network back into service, in 1994, and had already experienced an accident, in exactly the same place, at the end of October 1998. A tram had already collided with another in the tunnel under the station, an accident due to excessive speed of one of the two trains which left 17 injured.
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