Well, does it really happen "fairly often"? Looking at the German train accidents in recent years, a lot of them don't have (human) casualties, so an event like

Well, does it really happen "fairly often"? Looking at the German train accidents in recent years, a lot of them don't have (human) casualties, so an event like this still seems pretty rare, considering the high amount of daily traffic. And because of that, this gets widely reported. This is literally my neck of the woods. I just commuted to work on a parallel route. And I actually read this here first. If the same amount of people died on the nearby Autobahn, this wouldn't be international news. But yeah, I'm very interested in hearing why this could happen at all. I just don't think its endemic, and I don't generally have a high opinion of the current state of the German railroad system (privatization was a bad idea).