A train station manager has taken partial blame for a deadly head-on collision that claimed at least 23 lives in one of Italy’s worst rail accidents, media reports yesterday said.
The crash happened on Tuesday on a single-track stretch of railway run by station managers who communicate directly with train drivers, a system Italian authorities described as “risky.”
“I’m the one who sent the train on its way,” Vito Piccarreta, head of the Andria station, told daily La Stampa. “There was some confusion; the trains were late.”
“But I’m not the only one at fault, everyone is blaming me. But I’m a victim too,” he said.
One of the four-carriage trains was supposed to have waited at a station to let the other train through, before heading down the track between the towns of Corato and Andria.
The go-ahead to proceed is given by the station managers by telephone.
Investigators said at least one of the trains had been traveling very fast, and have believed from the start the collision was possibly caused by human error.
Three trains — which is one more than usual — were supposed to travel on the single-track section on Tuesday, which may have been the source of the confusion for the Andria station chief, according to a reconstruction by La Stampa.
However, the Corato station master, Alessio Porcelli, is also under investigation because he could have noticed a train was headed his way.
According to La Stampa, the line dates to 1965. It said a call for tenders to modernize the security system and lay a second track had been scheduled to open later this month.
About 55 percent of the rail network in Italy is single track. A pot of 150 million euros (US$166 million) allocated by the European Regional Development Fund in the 2007 to 2013 budget to add second tracks went largely unused, the newspaper said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion