Thomas Warnack / AFP
The rescue teams work on the site of a train derail near Riedlingen, Germany, July 27, 2025.
Germany – A regional train derailed Sunday July 27 at the end of the day in a wooded area in the southwest of Germany, killing at least three people and 41 injured, according to the latest assessment by the police.
A hundred passengers were on board during the accident that occurred around 6:10 p.m. near Riedlingen, in Baden-Wurtemberg, a hundred kilometers south of Stuttgart.
Three people died in the accident, including the driver of the train and a staff member on board and at least 41 people were injured, some of which seriously. Traffic is still suspended on the affected rail line and cleaning work should start on Tuesday.
The privileged landslide track
According to the first results of the investigation, this fatal accident was probably caused by a landslide. “According to the first hypotheses, the heavy rains that fell on the accident area would have caused the overflow of a sewer”said ULM police and Ravensburg prosecutors in a joint statement.
“The water would then have caused a landslide in the embankment bordering the railroad, which would have led to the derailment of the train”add the investigators that there is no sign of a criminal act, while violent thunderstorms swept the region at the time of the accident, according to meteorological services.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said “Deeply upset”saying her “Sympathy to the victims and their loved ones”. “I am in close contact with the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Transport, to whom I asked to put all the means necessary for the disposal teams”he added on social network X.
Already a fatal accident in 2022
The intervention continued until late at night, the emergency services took several hours to evacuate the victims before working to release the yellow and gray cars of the train overturned on the side, according to the images broadcast on televisions, in a placed and difficult to access place. According to the German media, they had to travel a long distance to reach the site. Helicopters have also been mobilized to evacuate the wounded to the surrounding hospitals.
German transport is regularly pointed out by passengers due to the delay in trains and the dilapidation of infrastructure. The new conservative government has committed to investing several hundred billion euros in the coming years, in particular to modernize infrastructure.
In June 2022, the derailment of a regional train had left four people dead and thirty injured in the Bavarian Alps, in the south of the country. A survey targeting three employees of the railway company Deutsche Bahn had subsequently opened for suspicion of negligence.
The deadliest railway accident in Germany occurred in 1998, when a high-speed train derailed in Eschede, in Basse-Saxe, in the north of the country, killing 101 people.
