Over the years, Europe has experienced several catastrophic train disasters including the 1998 Eschede high-speed rail crash that killed 101 people in Germany and the 2013 Santiago de Compostela derailment in Spain that resulted in 79 fatalities. The good news is that train crashes are becoming rarer in the European Union and recently published Eurostat data provides an overview of the positive trend.
In 2019, there were 516 significant railway accidents with 802 fatalities in the EU, a decrease on the 853 deaths recorded in 2018. The 2019 figure is also a considerable improvement on 2010 when the death toll was 1,245. In 2019, Hungary had the highest number of railway deaths per million of its inhabitants at 8.9 while nine EU member states (Slovenia, Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, Spain, Ireland, Luxembourg) registered less than one.
