SHARE
COPY LINK

ACCIDENT

Oil spill cleanup after train hits garbage bin

Several hundred litres of oil leaked out of a commuter train in Lerum outside Gothenburg after it drove over a garbage bin that police suspect could have been deliberately placed on the tracks.

Oil spill cleanup after train hits garbage bin

According to the emergency services in Gothenburg, between 500 and 600 litres of oil spilled from the train after it hit an object in the early hours of Sunday.

“We are on the ground working with a decontamination firm,” Lars Jostelius of the emergency services told local newspaper Göteborgs Posten (GP) on Sunday morning.

Initially, local police did not want to specify what kind of object it was, but said they were not ruling out sabotage. In other words, one person or a group of people could have deliberately placed the object on the tracks.

The Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket) later confirmed that the object was a garbage bin.

Incidents where an object is placed on train tracks are labelled “infrastructure sabotage” by the Transport Administration.

The fact that someone could have deliberately placed the garbage bin on the tracks is regarded as very serious, said the Transport Administration.

“There could be serious accidents and there are costs involved for society when a train is stalled and has to be repaired,” Bodil Sonesson, a Swedish Transport Administration spokeswoman, told news agency TT.

There were no passengers on board the train when it hit the garbage bin and no reported injuries.

The train traffic was confined to a single track while the leaking train was being removed in an extensive cleanup operation.

This led to delays of between 10 and 15 minutes up until lunchtime on Sunday.

TT/The Local/nr Follow The Local on Twitter

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

TRAVEL NEWS

Swedish rail company SJs site crashes on Christmas tickets release

The booking site of Sweden's state-owned rail company SJ crashed on Tuesday evening after the company released long-awaited tickets for the Christmas period.

Swedish rail company SJs site crashes on Christmas tickets release

The company on Tuesday night released tickets for the period from December 11th to March 12th next year, only to see the site crash under the volume of booking requests. 

“There are enormous amounts of customers who want to buy tickets, even though it’s the middle of the night,” Lina Edström, a press officer for the company said shortly after midnight. “The home page quite simply can’t cope with responding to so many requests at the same time. 

The site started to work again a few hours later, only to crash once again as people woke up and started booking on Wednesday morning. 

“The reports we are getting is that it’s working for some people and not for others. That’s what we’re seeing as Sweden wakes up and more and more people try and get onto the site,” said Jonas Olsson, another press officer at 7.30am. 

READ ALSO:

The release of Christmas tickets in Sweden has been severely delayed because of late publication of the Swedish Transport Administration train plan for 2023, which coordinates the times for all passenger and goods trains in Sweden. 

The train plan should have been published at the start of August, giving companies 18 weeks to set tickets from December 10th. It was only released on October 19th. The administration said that it has had problems due to change over to a digital system. 

Many customers have been complaining that they have seen prices for Christmas trips double in the time it has taken them to book a ticket. 

Olsson told the TT newswire that SJ’s pricing system is based on the level of demand. 

“I understand the frustration, and we may well look at this going forward,” he said. “But even if many people have ended up in this situation, there are many others who have been able to buy cheaper tickets.” 

SHOW COMMENTS