Points failure cause of deadly rail crash?

photo - PAP/Grzegorz Michałowski

The head-on collision between an inter-city train from Warsaw to Krakow and a regional service from Przemysl to Warsaw was Poland's worst rail disaster in over two decades.

A switch, or “set of points”, facilitates a train to pass from one track to another.
Bogdan Marszalek, a train driver who regularly uses the route where the accident occurred, told the Rzeczpospolita daily that although the tracks are new, the traffic control system is still being fine-tuned.

“It is not the driver that decides which track he goes on,” he stressed.

It has also been suggested that the driver of the “Matejko” inter-city train from Warsaw to Krakow may have had doubts that his locomotive had taken the right course.

According to surviving passengers on the Krakow-bound service, the train slowed down just a few minutes before the collision.

“The slowing down of the train may indicate that the driver had doubts about whether he was on the right track,” said railway union spokesman Jan Gliszczynski.

The government has said that it is too early to determine the causes of the crash.
However, the On-Train Monitoring Recorders (OTMR), which are comparable to airplanes' “black boxes”, have been located at the site of the accident.

These should prove to be invaluable items in the unfolding investigation, and prosecutor Tomasz Ozimek has said that the material on the OTMRs appears to be legible. (nh/pg)