A train hit a car at a crossing in northern Germany early on Sunday, killing all three people in the car.
Photos from the scene show a car completely devasted from the impact and police said that the regional train hit the car at full speed near Neustadt am Ruebenberge, outside the city of Hannover.
The car's 22-year-old driver was killed along with two women who were with him in the vehicle, aged 21 and 22. There were 38 passengers and four railway employees on board the train and one person was slightly injured.
The car apparently drove onto a crossing despite the barriers, which didn't cover the whole width of the road, being closed.
Shortly before the impact, the train driver saw the car driving around the barrier, a spokeswoman confirmed to BILD.
In June last year, a train derailed in southern Germany, killing four and seriously injuring a number of people.
The train derailed near the popular ski resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen and had numerous students aboard.
The horror crash came only a few days after Germany launched a new discounted rail ticket to encourage its citizens to take the train.
The train was apparently "very crowded and many people were using it, hence the high number of injured".
Air ambulances on-site took injured passengers to the hospital and some of the emergency services used ladders to get into the carriages to free the injured passengers, local newspapers reported.
An elderly man who survived the accident unharmed said everything happened very quickly. He told the Tagblatt: "Suddenly there was a lot of rumbling and then there was dust."
Germany registered 237 rail accidents in 2021, the highest number of railway accidents among the EU Member States, followed by Poland with 209.
Those two countries recorded almost one-third of all significant railway accidents in the EU in that year.
