Bucharest Metro officials have appealed for help in working out how to get an underground train that has been stuck in the air inside a terminal in the capital city ever since it crashed a year ago.
The incident happened when the train which was travelling at 50 kph careered unchecked into the depot and smashed through a guardrail at the end of a raised track where it became embedded in a wall.
The train is one of those on the Bucharest Metro, which has four lines in the capital city which carry over 700,000 passengers a day and is run by Metrorex, which also manages the 47 stations as well as the associated depots like this one where the accident happened.
Between 2013 and 2016 the company introduced 24 trains from Spanish company CAF including this one which smashed into the wall in the Berceni depot on 26th January last year.
The driver of the train who realised he had lost control of the engine had fled the cab, and ran back into the rear section of the train which probably saved his life when it smashed through a guardrail. The man suffered a fractured pelvis but his injuries could have been far worse had he remained.
Fearing that the wedged train might cause the entire section of the building to collapse, it has been stuck there ever since while engineers carry out a risk assessment and also attempt to find out what went wrong.
And this week they have now put out a tender for the work, having completed at the same time the investigation in which the Romanian Railway Investigation Agency (AGIFER) concluded that faulty software was to blame as it effectively took control of the train and the driver had no opportunity to do anything to stop it.
The president of the Metrorex union, Ion Radoi, said the fault for the crash with a Spanish company Alstom and the local transport ministers who had been in office for the past year. He said it would probably take another three months before the train was finally removed.
After the incident, Radoi demanded that all CAF subway trains should be withdrawn from circulation because of the problems with the on-board computer which can make them impossible to control and which he directly blamed for the January crash.
The depot had recently undergone a refurbishment and the underground officials hope that removing the carriage can be carried out in the next three months so they can reclaim the use of the depot which has been out of action since then.
Applications to carry out the work need to be made by 13th February.
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Story By: Michael Leidig, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News
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