Berlin U-Bahn - Accidents

Accidents

The Berlin U-Bahn ranks among the safest modes of transport: its history features few accidents.

The most severe accident occurred at the original Gleisdreieck (rail triangle), where the main and branch lines were connected by switches that allowed the tracks to cross. On 26 September 1908, a train driver missed a stop signal. As a result, two trains collided at the junction, and one fell off the viaduct. The accident killed eighteen people, and severely injured another twenty-one. Gleisdreieck's triangular layout had already been deemed unsuitable for future developments; this incident—and a later, less-serious one—triggered its reconstruction as a multi-level station, starting in 1912.

On 30 June 1965, a train with brake failure stopped on the G line—today's U9—between Zoologischer Garten and Hansaplatz. Unaware of the faulty train, a mechanic working at the Zoologischer Garten signal tower noticed that the leaving signal had been set to 'Stop' for a long time. Thinking it should be set to 'Go', after several attempts, he manually changed the signal, in defiance of regulations that strictly prohibited such actions. The following train, which had been waiting at Zoologischer Garten, then left the station on the same track. With emergency brakes unable to prevent the accident, the two trains collided. One passenger was killed in the crash, and 97 were injured. The mechanic was fined 600,000 DM.

Fires can be particularly dangerous and damaging within an underground system. In October 1972, two trains and a 200 m length of tunnel were completely destroyed when the trains caught fire; the reconstructed tunnel is clearly differentiated from the old one. Another train burned out in the connecting tunnel between Klosterstraße and Alexanderplatz in 1987. On 8 July 2000, the last car of a GI/I train suffered a short circuit, burning out at the rear of the Deutsche Oper station. The single exit of the station was unreachable, forcing the passengers to run through the tunnel to reach the next emergency exit. The fire also damaged the station, which remained closed until September. The Portuguese Ambassador, João Diogo Nunes Barata, presented the BVG with azulejos (tiled paintings), specially designed for the station, by the artist José de Guimarães. Installation of Portugal's gift to the city was completed on 30 October 2002.

As a consequence of the Deutsche Oper incident, BVG decided to post an employee at every station with only one exit until a second exit could be built. Over the following few years, many of those stations—including Britz-Süd, Schillingstraße, Viktoria-Luise-Platz, Uhlandstraße, and Theo. Heuss Platz—were refitted with additional exits. By June 2008, the only remaining stations with no second exit, Konstanzer Straße and Rudow, had been fitted with second exits. Despite these changes, several passenger organisations—such as Pro Bahn, and IGEB—demand that stations with exits in the middle of the platform are also fitted with additional emergency exits. Many stations are built this way; meeting those demands would place a heavy financial burden on both the BVG and the city.

The U6 saw a particularly costly, though casualty-free, incident on 25 March 2003. Scheduled repair work on the line limited the normal service to between Alt-Mariendorf and Kurt-Schumacher-Platz; one train then shuttled back and forth between Kurt-Schumacher-Platz and Holzhauser Straße, sharing a platform at Kurt-Schumacher-Platz with the normal-service trains departing for their return journey to Alt-Mariendorf. Needing to pass several stop signals on the shuttle service, the driver had been given special instructions how to proceed. Unfortunately, he ignored the signal at the entry to Kurt-Schumacher-Platz, and ploughed into the side of a train heading back to Alt-Mariendorf. The impact wrecked both trains, and caused considerable damage to the tracks. Normal service did not resume for two days, and the removal of the two wrecked trains—which, surprisingly, could still roll along the tracks—also took nearly 48 hours.