Six out of nine cars of an Intercity passenger train came off the rails near Zaporizhia, a city of nearly 800,000 people located 600 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.
The accident happened on March 29 when a train with 88 passengers was heading from Kyiv to Zaporizhia, according to state railway company Ukrzaliznytsia.
No one was injured as a result of the derailment. Now Ukrzaliznytsia plans to deliver the passengers to Zaporizhia and replace cars that came off the tracks with new ones for the return journey.
It is not yet clear what caused the derailment, but Ukrzaliznytsia said that it will investigate the case. The Hyundai Rotem “Intercity+” trains can only go about 120 kilometers per hour because of the generally poor condition of Ukraine’s railroad tracks. But the trains can travel up to speeds of 160 kilometers per hour, still too slow to be categorized as high-speed trains.
The screenshot from a video captured by a passenger of Ukrainian Intercity train that partly came off tracks on March 29, while heading from Kyiv to Zaporizhia, a city of nearly 800,000 people located 600 kilometers southeast of Kyiv. None of the 88 passengers was injured during the accident. The cause of the derailment is unknown as of 6 pm March 29.
It is not the first time that trains come off the tracks in Ukraine. Much of the country’s 40,000 kilometers of passenger and freight train railways have been neglected for years and are generally in very poor condition.
Ukrzaliznytsia’s equipment and rail lines are outdated and in dire need of modernization. Currently, nearly 70% of 2,000 active locomotives aren’t equipped with GPS, making it hard to see where exactly the locomotives are.
The company itself struggles from corruption scandals and mismanagement.
On March 17, the Cabinet of Ministers fired Volodymyr Zhmak, the head of Ukrzaliznytsia for allegedly lobbying oligarch Rinat Akhmetov’s interests and making decisions that violated the company’s statute.
