The first witnesses in the courtroom in Lodi, four years after the train disaster of 6 February 2020, when a Frecciarossa 1000 train departing from Milan and heading to Salerno derailed at a maximum speed of 300 kilometers per hour at interchange number 5 of the ” Livraga movement station” not far from the A1 Ospedaletto Lodigiano toll booth, on the RFI High Speed Milan – Bologna line. Historically, the first Italian high speed disaster. The forensic police documented with videos and photos the very heavy damage on almost 500 meters of railway, images that recall the effects of a war action, given the forces at play. The medical examiner confirmed that the two train drivers Giuseppe Cicciù and Mario Di Cuonzo, thrown out of the cabin, died instantly, torn to pieces by the multiple impacts both inside and outside the engine, which had separated from the rest of the train and after collided with service wagons on the sidings and overturned, even projecting a trolley into a field. The motorway is 70 meters from the point of the derailment, fortunately, the investigators note, the steel elements weighing quintals were projected towards the left of the railway, and not towards the A1. If the engine had not detached itself from the rest of the train, thanks to a safety design feature specific to the Frecciarossa 1000 which caused the connecting hook to break, it could have been much worse, a witness noted, with the entire train following the crazy race of the engine. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, everything was triggered by an exchange that was oriented in reverse, due to a reversed wire inside an actuator supplied by Alstom Ferroviaria. An RFI manager and 4 Alstom workers are accused: the temporary worker who screwed the wires wrong, the technician who had to check them, the two engineers held responsible for the design and assembly techniques of the actuators. The CEOs of RFI and Alstom have been acquitted, the two workers who installed the actuator with an internal defect in Livraga have already been sentenced to 3 years with an abbreviated sentence. Among the defense consultants in the trial is the engineer Domenico Romaniello, already appointed by the Lodi Prosecutor’s Office in the investigation for the Maleo level crossing where in August 2020 Elisa Conzadori was mowed down by a train: a death which however remained without culprits.
Frecciarossa, here’s what really happened. Video by Carlo Catena
