Ten people have died at railway crossings with safety deficiencies

In 2017, a fatal accident occurred at a railway crossing in Smaland in Vaggeryd.

When a man was going to cross the tracks with his wheel loader, there was not enough space, so he was left with the rear of the vehicle on the track. Then came the train.

"It's a real damn death trap," says Dragan Rakonjac, who lives nearby.

Ten years earlier, the Swedish Transport Administration refurbished the route, then according to the guidelines, they would have increased safety at the transition. But it was not done.

Assignment review has gone through all fatal accidents at railroad crossings since 2013. In at least ten of the cases, safety deficiencies have contributed to the outcome. These include:

• Distances that are so short that the person crossing the track runs the risk of getting stuck with the car.

• Transitions with such poor visibility that the person passing should have only a few seconds to see the train.

• Completely missing warning signs.

All this violates the Swedish Transport Administration's own rules.

In addition, assignment review has gained access to the Swedish Transport Administration's own register showing the shortcomings of the railway crossings. It says that the requirement for free visibility is not met at more than 1,100 unguarded transitions - passersby have less than ten seconds to see the train.

In the investigations of fatal accidents, there is a twelve-year-old boy who died after being hit by a transition with an extinct warning system.

Another example is an elderly woman who would go over a transition that was incorrectly constructed, there was too much distance between the tracks. She came over the first two, but never over the third. A freight train drove her to death.

- I see a person who did not discover the train in time, but she tried to speed up. It was minus degrees and very slippery, says the train driver in the Swedish Transport Administration's investigation.

Several of the ten deaths have occurred in unguarded transitions. This means that they lack all forms of active protection. They do not have bars, no sound or light signals that warn that trains are coming.

There are also transitions where there have been several accidents without the Swedish Transport Administration increasing safety so that it follows their own guidelines.

Just this happened outside Stenungsund, where a person was killed at a railroad crossing in 2002. Ten years later, in 2012, the Swedish Transport Administration found that the transition - given that so many utilize it - had to be equipped with booms if the trains run at over 80 kilometers per hour.

But the trains were allowed to run faster and no booms were set up. In 2016 another man was killed and in 2018 an older couple was hit by the train, but survived.

The Swedish Transport Administration's Director General Lena Erixon is self-critical that the authority is not clear enough on what to do after a defect has been identified and when it should be done - and to ensure that a measure is clearly included in the Swedish Transport Administration's plans.

- We will live with unguarded transitions for a long time. What we need to do is look at where the risks are greatest. What is it we can do to save most human lives?

Lena Erixon gets to look at the investigation into the death in Småland Vaggeryd - where the Swedish Transport Administration should have addressed the shortcomings ten years before the accident happened.

- It's too long. I think so too. We need to be clearer that this is not in accordance with the guidelines we have, if there are major risks, then it should be addressed.

The government has recently decided to add SEK 100 billion in infrastructure investments, of which ten billion is about increasing road safety. A specific mission is to increase the safety of railway crossings.

Assignment review report The railway death traps were broadcast in SVT1 on Wednesday, February 6, 20:00 - there is a look at SVT Play.