One of Europe’s most influential industry magnates has thrown himself in front of a train after his business empire began to crumble.

Adolf Merckle, the 74-year-old head of a conglomerate that employs thousands in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, killed himself on Monday.

After writing a suicide note for his family, he checked the railway timetable and walked to the track that ran close to his home in the village of Blaubeuren, southwest Germany. His body was found at 7.30pm.

“The economic distress in his companies as the result of the financial crisis and the associated uncertainties of the last weeks, as well as his sense of impotence at no longer being able to act, destroyed this passionate family entrepreneur, and he ended his life,” a statement released by the family said.

Before his world started to fall apart last autumn, Mr Merckle was employing 100,000 people and turning more than ¤30 billion a year. Forbes magazine had put his personal fortune at ¤7 billion. He had built the group from a small inherited pharmaceutical firm employing 80 workers. But almost every one of the offshoots of the Merckle empire was in serious trouble.

His HeidelbergCement was having problems digesting Hanson, its recently purchased British competitor. Demand had slipped away for electric motors, machine tools and even the snowcats that he made for ski-trail maintenance. He was also thought to be the biggest individual loser from a dramatic swing in the share price of Volkswagen last year in which he is thought to have lost more than ¤200 million.

As well as Hanson, Heidelberg’s businesses in Britain included Castle Cement, SRM, a recycling company, and Minerals Resource Management, which recycles inorganic materials into the cement industry.

Although he had scratched together a ¤400 million loan for his companies, Mr Merckle was said to have become depressed by the decline in his fortunes. His creditors — about 30 banks including the Royal Bank of Scotland — had closed in on him, demanding his Swiss companies as security.

Most painfully of all, they demanded the sale of Ratiopharm, which he had always considered his legacy to his four children. State prosecutors had also opened a case against Ratiopharm for allegedly offering incentives to doctors to prescribe its products.

Mr Merckle was typical of the self-made men from Baden-Württemberg, the most prosperous corner of Germany. He did not own yachts or fleets of luxury cars and avoided jet-set parties. He always travelled second class on the train, insisted on the family going on cycling holidays and, when they travelled to the mountains he would go only to the places where his family had a concession on the ski lifts.

“He plainly could not come to terms with losing even part of his empire,” Frank Seidlitz, a business commentator, said. “What people close to the family patriarch are saying is, ‘Adolf was always the strong one, full of self-confidence — and he always took defeat badly’.”

Credit crunch casualties

Kirk Stephenson, the 47-year-old New Zealand-born chief operating officer at the private equity firm Olivant, died instantly when he was hit by a train at Taplow station in Buckinghamshire, on September 25 last year. A jury returned a verdict of suicide

René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, 65, a French financier, locked the door of his New York office last month, swallowed sleeping pills and slashed his wrists with a craft knife. He was facing losses from investing with the alleged fraudster Bernard Madoff. His family said that his suicide was a “matter of honour”

Paulo Sergio Silva, 36, a trader for the brokerage arm of the Brazilian banking giant Itaú, shot himself in the chest during the afternoon trading session of São Paulo’s commodities and futures exchange in an apparent suicide attempt in November. Trading stopped for about 15 minutes

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