Berlin - Germany widened Wednesday its checks on cracking wheels under trains, with the spotlight this time on a communist-era type of railway-carriage wheels.

German rail regulator EBA called for checks on the wheels of double-decker passenger cars operated by Deutsche Bahn for local services and taken over from the old East German rail company.

Deutsche Bahn last year halted part of its ICE bullet-train fleet after the discovery of axle cracks, and this week idled two thirds of its Berlin mass-transit-train fleet to check for wheel failures.

An East German-made rail axle has also been implicated in the Viareggio disaster in Italy on June 30, when a tanker car derailed, setting off a fireball that killed 22 people.

An EBA spokeswoman said the latest crack was discovered on July 17. All similar bogeys would be checked, and logbooks of past checks by Deutsche Bahn mechanics would be reviewed.

Deutsche Bahn said it had been checking this model every 3,000 kilometres.

Prosecutors have declined to prosecute Deutsche Bahn, ruling that an axle crack a year ago in an ICE-3 train was the result of an unforeseeable metal defect. Bahn now checks that type of axle 10 times as often as before.(dpa)