Even if we quickly forgot them, the images were spectacular… On November 14, 2015, a TGV testing the new high-speed line to Strasbourg derailed in Eckwersheim (Bas-Rhin), with 53 people on board. Results: 11 dead and 42 injured. According to experts, a braking error was the cause of the derailment. The train approached a curve at a speed of 265 km/h instead of 176 km/h. Centrifugal force overturned the cars. The first was slowed down by the parapet of a bridge, the others turned around. The last one ended up partially submerged in the Marne-Rhine canal.
Occurring the day after the attacks at the Bataclan, the Stade de France and the eleventh arrondissement of Paris, the accident had limited media coverage, but created a shock wave within the SNCF: the 53 people on board for this phase test were all railway workers, employees of subsidiaries or their guests, including four children, unharmed.
The trial, which opens this Monday March 4 before the 31e Correctional chamber of the Paris court, will it attract more attention? It falls at the time when a special Assize Court is judging the attack on the Strasbourg Christmas market in 2018… Another difficulty: the hearings, which must allow the civil parties to better understand what happened on the train, very technical announcement, after eight years of investigation by the magistrates of the pole “collective accidents”. They will last more than two months, until May 16.
Responsibility transfer
The SNCF, its subsidiaries Systra (sponsor of the tests) and SNCF Réseau (track manager), as well as three people who were in the cabin: the driver in control on the day of the tests, the “traction manager” who gives driving instructions, and a Systra expert. The two test leaders, that of SNCF and that of Systra, were in another car and were killed in the accident.
As Nicolas Heury, the son of the train’s conductor who died at the age of 58, told Agence France-Presse, the relatives of the victims and the injured expect companies to “take responsibility for their mistakes” at the hearing. “They must not pass the buck. » Even though they are all part of the “SNCF family”which was ready to recognize its moral responsibility, as its president, Guillaume Pepy, said in 2015, none today wants to be blamed for the accident.
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