Transrapid's Future

Speaking after a meeting in Berlin, Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee said that the decision about a commercial maglev line in Munich might have to be postponed. Officials had originally planned to decide this fall whether a 37-kilometer (22.9-mile) track would be built from Munich airport to the Bavarian capital's city center.

"For me, this is first and foremost about security," Tiefensee told reporters after the meeting with representatives from the companies that developed the Transrapid maglev train technology, which is so far only used in Shanghai and on the test track, where 23 people were killed on Friday when a train crashed into a repair car that was still on the track.

"Such an accident must never happen again," Tiefensee said, adding that the federal and Bavarian state governments would appoint an independent investigator to look into causes of the crash.

China no longer interested?

While Tiefensee said that the technology itself should not be called into question at this point, Chinese officials are reportedly losing faith.

Germany daily Die Welt will report in its Monday edition that Chinese officials will talk about further Transrapid projects this week. A planned extension of the Shanghai line is now highly unlikely, according to the paper.

Human error responsible?

Investigators of the crash in Germany meanwhile said that human error was likely to blame for the accident as workers had failed to notice that the repair car was still on the track. It's also not clear why the train drivers did not activate the emergency brakes earlier as the repair car should have been visible on the track from far away.

Tiefensee, his Bavarian counterpart and Transrapid developers said that the security concept for a track in Munich would be expanded, preventing a similar accident to happen on that line.