Late on Wednesday evening, rescue personnel were alerted to central Örebro. Several people had then been hit by a freight train in connection with a railway crossing at Södra station.
A man in his 25s, a woman in his 20s and a boy in his early teens died on the spot.
SVT Nyheter has obtained data from the Swedish Transport Administration which shows that the current railway crossing has several known deficiencies.
30 events in 2023
In December 2017, a fatal accident occurred at the same station.
Locomotive drivers have long sounded the alarm that the transition is unsafe due to people moving on the tracks, as is evident from incident reports from the Swedish Transport Administration.
Last year alone, 30 incidents were reported at the level crossing. In all cases, it is about people who were on, or in the vicinity of, the track, which entailed a risk.
Four examples from 2023:
• 21 november: A train driver saw a person almost hit by a passing freight train. According to the incident report, the person was standing between the tracks.
• July 18: Several people got stuck between the gates on the track when a train was on its way. The people climbed over the gate.
• February 7: Both train drivers and passengers crossed the track when a train was approaching. The crossing is used “to cross the railroad between neighborhoods,” the report states.
• February 2: A traveler crossed the track when a train had already started to signal for departure. The train driver blew his horn and the person then stopped in the middle of the track and looked around before crossing.
Since 2017, there have been a total of 71 reported incidents.
– Passing over a track at all is dangerous. Now we’ll see what the investigation shows and why there were people on the track, says Trafikverket’s press manager Bengt Olsson.
111 extra dangerous transitions
Last year, nine people died in accidents at one of Sweden’s over 6,000 railway crossings.
SVT Nyheter has previously mapped 111 crossings that the Swedish Transport Administration points out as particularly dangerous. The current transition in Örebro is not on the list.
