Two people were killed and 17 injured when a passenger train struck a semitrailer towing a U.S. military vehicle near the Grafenwoehr training base, police said Friday.
The accident late Thursday killed the driver of the truck, a 30-year-old Romanian. A second body, believed to be that of the 35-year-old train engineer, was still lodged in the train as of Thursday evening, a police spokesman said. Sixteen passengers on the train were injured in the accident, four of them seriously enough to be hospitalized. None suffered life-threatening injuries.
A passenger in the truck, another Romanian, suffered minor injuries. No Americans were involved in the crash.
The semitrailer was struck about 10 p.m., while stopped on a level railroad crossing near the town of Freihung, on the base’s southern boundary. The impact tore the truck cab from its trailer and dragged it along the track, destroying it. The trailer hardly moved at all, police said. The Army truck was undamaged, said Lt. Col. Brian Carlin, spokesman for the training command at the base.
The driver’s navigation system appeared to have taken him in the wrong direction as he looked for the base, said Karl-Heinz Schoepf, an officer from the police station in nearby Auerbach.
The semitrailer was towing a truck belonging to the Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment, Carlin said. The vehicle was being returned from the Brave Warrior military exercise in Hungary and Romania.
The two-wagon commuter train was traveling between Nuremberg and Weiden, a town east of Grafenwoehr.
U.S. Army Garrison Bavaria is home to the Army’s Joint Multinational Training Command, based on the Grafenwoehr side of the installation, and the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, located on Rose Barracks, near the town of Vilseck.
Marcus Kloeckner and Stars and Stripes reporter Mike Darnell contributed to this report.
