German high-speed rail catastrophe

At 5:45 on June 3, 1998, an Intercity High Speed ​​Rail train 884 parked at the Munich station in Germany was officially launched. With a total of 400 passengers on 12 cars, it will travel 850 kilometers and eventually reach its destination Hamburg.

In the past seven years, this intercity high-speed rail has never had any accidents. However, no one thought that this record will be broken in a few hours. At 10:59 a.m., the tragedy occurred when the 884 train traveled for more than 5 hours and reached Hamburg in 40 minutes.

When the 884 train traveled to a road bridge in Ashdod, the car suddenly derailed and hit the bridge! In an instant, due to violent impact, all the cars twisted into a ball. They squeezed each other up and twisted five or six meters high. The 300-ton double-lane bridge collapsed completely. 101 passengers died on the spot and some passengers were seriously injured. Fall for lifelong disability. This is the worst high-speed rail accident in the history of human railways!

The experts quickly investigated this and they quickly found a broken wheel rim from the scene. After research, this rim is the culprit of the tragedy! It turned out that at the time of the opening of the HSR, the wheels used on the No. 884 train were single-layered, that is, made of a complete piece of steel, but the German railway soon discovered that this single-layered wheel had its imperfections. That is, when the train starts, the wheels will generate friction inwards, which in turn will generate a lot of noise and affect the passengers in the car.

There are two ways to change this situation: one is to change rails or trains, and the other is to improve the wheels. Obviously, the former is impractical, while the latter is relatively easy and saves money. The German railways decided to implement the latter.

On August 31, 1992, the German railway opened the improved 064 double-decker wheel. Compared with the previous model, the 064 wheel was wrapped with a wheel on the outside of the original single-layer wheel with a rubber pad between the two wheels. Sure enough, after replacing the double-layer wheel, friction and noise were gone.

Until the accident, there was no problem with the double-decker wheels, which made the German Railway confident.

However, they have overlooked the problem that due to the heavy pressure they carry, the metal of the double-decker wheels will be fatigued due to the mutual compression and automatic telescoping. This repeated squeezing and stretching will cause the gradual aging of the steel until the final fracture, which is like two paper clips back and forth to fold back and forth, and ultimately will break the truth.

Today, the German railway has unloaded the Type 064 double-decker wheel and replaced it with a single-layer wheel. The German government has also built a memorial on the site of the accident. The high-speed rail all over the world has also learned lessons from this accident.