By staff reporters Yang Binbin, Ouyang Hongliang, Zhang Na and Wang Heyan

The pre-dawn derailment of a passenger train on the so-called “Olympic Route” in eastern Shandong Province that killed 71 people April 28 was officially blamed on speed and human error, including confusion in a nearby railway control room and a lack of coordination between station operators and engineers aboard the doomed train.

(crumpled remains of the train)

But a Caijing investigation has found that a construction-related -- and controversial -- track detour that created a sharp, half-circle turn actually sowed the seeds of disaster.

There were hints of trouble circulating for some time. Three months ago, a train traveling on the same route hit and killed 18 workers on the track. Seven months earlier, a freight train derailed from another part of the path. Causes for accidents varied. But bad coordination is certainly one factor to blame.

The Railway Ministry has learned from the hard lessons. Ten days after the recent disaster happened, the ministry dispatched inspection teams to 18 railway bureaus around the nation to check safety mechanisms. But to eradicate the risks from the roots up, reform must be introduced into the colossal railway system that incorporates both government agencies and business enterprises. 

A Doomed Journey
At about 4:40 in the morning of April 28, the train numbered T195 wound through the darkness, heading to Qingdao. Most passengers were sleeping. Suddenly, some were awakened as the train shifted and eight cars jumped the tracks. Three minutes later, another train coming from the opposite direction on a parallel track struck the cars. In total 72 were killed, and some 416 passengers were injured.

Wu Juan, 29, was an attendant working on the doomed train. She recalls hearing wheels screaming, and then the car jumped twice before rolling over and sending her to the floor. When Wu sat up, she found her co-worker crying for help, crushed on the floor by a loosened water tank. Half an hour later, Wu came back with a rescue team but the girl was dead.

(Internal view of the damage)

The accident is the most serious in China’s history. The previous catastrophic record was set in 1988 by a train turned upside down when traveling from the southwestern city of Kunming to Shanghai. With death toll of 88 and 202 injured, Ding Guangen, then minister of the Railway Ministry resigned.

The Fatal Turn
The detour that hosted the accident opened in March to steer trains around the construction site for a railway land bridge, which is being built to handle faster trains and is supposed to be completed by July 1, in time for the Summer Olympics in August. The rail line connects the Olympics’ main host Beijing and the host city for the Olympics boating competition, Qingdao.

In addition, the detour was aimed at pacifying local residents who had protested plans for new tracks that cut through their village in 2004.

The semi-circle detour allows trains to bypass the original tracks, above which the bridge is being built, as well as the village of Hejiacun. Last year, as the construction project got under way, local protests prompted officials to scrap another proposed detour route that would have cut through the village.

The rail ministry had launched an aggressive modernization plan for the stretch of tracks in 2002. The plan was to allow higher train speeds for what had been an aged railway built by German colonizers in 1904 to connect the major Shandong cities of Qingdao and Jinan.

The new railway stretches as long as 364 kilometers, and more than half of it is built on renovated, existing tracks. The short construction period, 17 months in total, caused a rush. A dozen detours are made to divert the traffic whose life span varies from one month to half a year. Accidents happened in two parts of the railway since September 2007, one being that which killed the 18 workers.

Villagers in Hejiacun had strongly protested the railway improvements in 2004 that laid new track through the middle of their community. Farmers whose homes were demolished to make way for the track were unhappy about their meager compensation of 250 yuan per square meter. Neither were they satisfied after the payments were raised by 100 yuan per square meter, which followed a mysterious attack on some villagers and a 90-minute rail blockade by enraged farmers.

Railway officials plan to use the detour until July. But they are aware of the risks, as are local residents who hear the constant screeching of brakes as trains round the bend.

“Each time a train passes, I can hear the shrill sound of wheels pressing against the track and carriages banging against each other,” Geng Yongshun, a local farmer, told Caijing. “I said to myself that an accident would happen sooner or later. And it did.”

Missed Warnings
The train was clocked at 131 kilometers per hour before the accident -- considerably higher than the 80 kph limit set for the detour. But investigators found that switchyard controllers had failed to send the locomotive engineer a required slow-down warning before the train reached the dangerous bend.

Controllers may have been overwhelmed. During the construction project, they face the daunting task of alerting engineers on 160 trains every day about the need to slow before reaching the detour. The original speed limit for detoured trains was 25 kph, but that was later raised to 45 kph and eventually to 80 kph.

The situation was further complicated by a local railway department notice April 23 that said 34 trains would change their schedules effective April 28 -- the day the accident happened.

The train was running half an hour behind schedule when it came to the half-circle turn. According to railway regulations, the driver would be fined by hundreds of yuan for a late arrival. It’s unknown whether the driver was in a hurry to catch up the schedule, but certainly he didn’t slow down at the sharp turn.

Relatives of one of the deceased told Caijing that the Ministry of Railways plans to compensate the family of each victim with between 150,000 and 170,000 yuan. 

1 yuan = 14 U.S. cents