EP07-1034_w_Bydgoszczy_%2833918648036%29

On 12 August 2011, an express train travelling from

Warsaw Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...

Katowice Katowice ( , , ; szl, Katowicy; german: Kattowitz, yi, קאַטעוויץ, Kattevitz) is the capital city of the Silesian Voivodeship in southern Poland and the central city of the Upper Silesian metropolitan area. It is the 11th most popul ...

in southern Poland derailed at

Baby An infant or baby is the very young offspring of human beings. ''Infant'' (from the Latin word ''infans'', meaning 'unable to speak' or 'speechless') is a formal or specialised synonym for the common term ''baby''. The terms may also be used to ...

, near

Piotrków Trybunalski Piotrków Trybunalski (; also known by #Etymology, alternative names), often simplified to Piotrków, is a city in central Poland with 71,252 inhabitants (2021). It is the second-largest city situated in the Łódź Voivodeship. Previously, it wa ...

, killing one passenger and injuring 80 others.

Accident

On Friday, 12 August 2011, a

PKP Intercity PKP Intercity is a company of PKP Group responsible for long-distance passenger transport. It runs about 350 trains daily, connecting mainly large agglomerations and smaller towns in Poland. The company also provides most international trains to ...

TLK train from to derailed at

, near the town of

. The accident happened at 16:15

local time Local time is the time observed in a specific locality. There is no canonical definition. Originally it was mean solar time, but since the introduction of time zones it is generally the time as determined by the time zone in effect, with daylight s ...

(14:15 UTC). Initially, four passengers were reported dead, but search of the wreckage with the use of lifting equipment and

rescue dogs Pet adoption is the process of transferring responsibility for a pet that was previously owned by another party such as a person, shelter, or rescue organization. Common sources for adoptable pets are animal shelters and rescue groups. Some or ...

established that only one 52-year-old man had died. A total of 81 passengers were injured, including about 20 in serious condition. The locomotive,

PKP class EU07 EU07 (manufacturer's designation: Pafawag 4E and HCP 303E) is the name for a Polish electric locomotive in service of the Polish railway operator '' PKP''. This locomotive was designed as a mixed traffic locomotive, and as such is used both in fre ...

, number 1034, and all four carriages derailed. The first carriage turned over. The train was full, carrying almost 280 passengers, as the accident happened on the Friday before the long weekend of the

Assumption Day The Assumption of Mary is one of the four Marian dogmas of the Catholic Church. Pope Pius XII defined it in 1950 in his apostolic constitution ''Munificentissimus Deus'' as follows: We proclaim and define it to be a dogma revealed by Go ...

holiday. After the accident, it was reported that the train had been travelling at on a section of line where the maximum permitted speed was only . The driver was placed under arrest in the hospital, and on 15 August 2011 a court placed him under detention for two months. In 2015 he was found guilty of causing the derailment and sentenced for three years and three months of prison.

Controversy

In 2019, Polish railway-journalist Karol Trammer wrote, that the investigation team (PKBWK, Państwowa Komisja Badań Wypadków Kolejowych) did not pay attention to the discrepancy between what driver said after derailment, and what has been saved by the audio register in Baby signal box, asserting that driver has pleaded guilty in what he told after the accident. PKBWK would also dismiss signal fault - to which the driver has pointed during interrogation, and 18 April 2012 incident in Baby, which involved signal fault - and train dispatcher error caused by workload and safety errors, as possible causes. In such circumstances, the driver should be acquitted according to ''in dubio pro reo'' rule, which was also used by Polish court during one train crash case in the past. In his 2020 book about rail crash in Otłoczyn, Jonasz Przybyszewski mentioned the accident in Baby as an example of lack of responsibility' sense among senior executives in PKP, which resulted in declaring the driver as guilty despite no proof and fact of 2013 control in Baby, which found out that the state of equipment used to control the traffic was not satisfactory.Jonasz Przybyszewski, ''25 godzina. Katastrofa kolejowa pod Otłoczynem'' (in Polish), Toruń: Time Marszałek Group, 2020, p. 163–164.

References

{{2011 railway accidents Baby derailment Derailments in Poland Baby derailment Piotrków County Baby derailment Baby derailment