BRIDGE COLLAPSED BY TRAIN CRASHING

BRIDGE COLLAPSED BY TRAIN CRASHING

This type of bridge collapse is extraordinarily rare, but one of the worst rail disasters in history, the Eschede train disaster, was a bridge collapse caused by train impact. In 1998, a high-speed train traveling through Germany suffered a mechanical malfunction of one of the wheels. The broken wheel struck a switch and shifted it, throwing subsequent cars onto a different track. Moving at roughly 124 miles (200 kilometers) per hour, the cars derailed and slammed into the piers of a road bridge that passed over the railroad tracks at that point. The massive impact brought the bridge down directly onto the passenger cars of the train, crushing them. As a result, 101 people died in the accident [source: Oestern]. Eighty-three people lost their lives in a similar tragedy near Sydney, Australia in 1977