Gotthard train crash report notes ignored warning signals

The Gotthard tunnel rail crash in 2023 Keystone / Urs Flueeler

Swiss Federal Railways might have prevented the 2023 Gotthard tunnel train derailment, according to an expert report commissioned by the Ticino public prosecutor's office.

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The consequences of a broken wheel in the Gotthard Base Tunnel in August 2023 were CHF150 million in repair works and a tunnel tube closed for over a year.

The new prosecutor’s report, which has been obtained by Swiss public broadcaster SRF, has uncovered errors. After the wheel of the eleventh freight train car broke, a whole series of warning messages were not heeded by operators.

Josef Dittli, a canton Uri parliamentarian and president of the industry association of freight wagon owners, is now sharply critical of the system. “If a train can travel kilometres into the tunnel and a trail of error messages appears on the screens – if it lights up red in the control centre and nobody intervenes, then something is clearly wrong with the system,” he said.

Philipp Hadorn, union secretary for railway staff, concurs. “This is an incident we’ve seen in other cases, and an emergency stop would have been the logical consequence. I can’t understand why it didn’t happen.”

“Everything functioned correctly”

According to the expert report, several fault messages appeared on the screens of the monitoring center in Pollegio shortly after the wheel broke on the day of the accident. One section remained red, as if the train were still there – even though the train had already passed that section. The report also concludes that malfunction countermeasures were disrupted as the dangling wheel had severed cables.

As the fault reports began to accumulate, around two and a half minutes before the derailment, the operations centre should have been alerted, according to the expert report. The train triggered a total of eight error messages. However, neither the system nor the staff recognised the dangerous situation.

Perhaps these messages didn’t alarm anyone because they had been appearing continuously on dispatchers’ screens for weeks in two other sections, reports the SRF Rundshau programme. According to Swiss Federal Railways, the axle counters were defective in those sections, but this did not pose a risk to operations.

Railway spokesperson Sabrina Schellenberg rejects the allegations in the expert report. She states that operations management acted correctly at all times and that all systems functioned flawlessly.

“The systems of the operations control centre are important for safety, but they do not monitor trains, rather the infrastructure. That means they do not monitor whether a train is derailing, but rather whether the infrastructure is clear. Everything functioned correctly.”

Hans-Peter Vetsch is a railway safety expert and developed the safety concept for the construction of the Gotthard Base Tunnel. He sees no fault on the part of the Swiss Federal Railways. “For me, as a long-time railway worker, this was nothing more than a technical axle counter malfunction. A derailment could in no way be interpreted from that.”

Approximately five minutes after the wheel broke, the train overran the switch at the Faido station. The dangling wheel destroyed the switch motors that held the switch blade in place. As a result, the train was torn apart.

Adapted from German by AI/mga

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