The most amazing train wrecks that happened in different parts of our planet:
1. The train flew over the veranda after the brakes failed.
Gare Montparnasse, which is one of the six largest railway terminals in Paris, became infamous on October 22, 1895 due to the derailment of the Granville-Paris Express, which ran over a stop beam. The locomotive drove along the entire station, which was 30 meters long, broke through a wall 60 centimeters thick, flew out of the building through the veranda and fell with its nose into the Rue de Rennes, which was 10 meters under the veranda. Two of the 131 passengers, as well as a fireman and two conductors, were injured. The only victim of this crash was a woman who was downstairs in the street at the time of the crash, and who was killed by a fallen piece of wall. The accident was caused by Westinghouse's brakes failing to work, and also by the driver who wanted to make up for the time he was running late. The conductor was fined 25 francs and the driver 50 francs.
2 Deadliest High Speed Train Crash 
The train crash in the German village of Eschede was the deadliest high-speed train disaster ever. It happened on June 3, 1998 near the village of Eschede in the Celle region, which is part of Lower Saxony, Germany. The crash killed 101 people and injured 88 others. This disaster surpassed the 1971 Dahlerau train crash in terms of casualties and became the deadliest accident in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. The cause of the derailment was one small crack in one wheel, which, finally failing, caused the train to derail at a rail changeover. The severe destruction of the train was caused by a collision with a road bridge that occurred after the train derailed.
3. The most fatal train crash in the world, which occurred due to the fact that the train was hit by a tsunami 
The train crash in Sri Lanka in 2004, caused by the tsunami, was the most fatal railway accident in history. The derailment occurred when a tsunami destroyed an overcrowded passenger train on Sri Lanka's coastal railway tracks. The tsunami generated by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake claimed the largest number of lives in the history of the railway. More than 1,700 people died, many more than the previous rail accident.
The train, known as the "Queen of the Sea Line", was an ordinary passenger train that circulated between the cities of Colombo (Colombo) and Galle (Galle). On Sunday, December 26, 2004, he left Colombo at approximately 6:55 am, carrying about 1000-1500 paying passengers and an unknown number of "hares".
At 9:30 a.m., the beach in the village of Peraliya, near Telwatta, was hit by the first of a huge wave from an earthquake that had hit just before off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The train stopped because the water rose around it. Hundreds of local residents thought that the train was holding up well on the rails and climbed onto its roof to avoid being washed away by the wave. Others stood next to him, hoping that the train would absorb the shock wave. The wave flooded the carriages and caused panic among the passengers. The next, larger wave lifted the train and brought it down on the houses and trees located along the rails, sweeping away everyone who sought salvation behind the train. Eight cars were so heavily packed with people that it was impossible to open their doors, and they quickly filled with water, which gradually drowned almost everyone inside, as the waves rolled in one after another. According to calculations based on the state of the coastline, as well as on the basis of the mark of the highest water level, the height of the tsunami waves was from 7.5 to 9 meters above sea level and from 2 to 3 meters above the level of the roof of the train.
4. Train hijacking and subsequent catastrophe from his collision with the house
Stealing cars, trucks, or motorcycles is hardly surprising, but stealing an entire train is a completely different matter. You don't hear about it every day. The thief was a 20-year-old woman who worked as a cleaner in Stockholm. She stole the keys to the train, then drove it to the end of the tracks at high speed and smashed it against the house after the train derailed and jumped across the street.
Fortunately, apart from a woman whose name has not been released, no one was hurt. The accident happened early in the morning, and there was still no one on the train. No one was in the house at the time of the collision.
Note: It was later determined that the train was not hijacked. The cleaner accidentally started it while she was cleaning the cab and couldn't figure out how to stop it.
5The unstoppable train caused the bridge to collapse
The train accident at Lewisham occurred at about 6:20 pm on December 4, 1957, on a bypass line in Louisham, London. In dense fog, an electric train bound for Hayes stopped on a signal under a bridge, and a steam locomotive following it bound for Ramsgate crashed into it. From this collision, the bridge collapsed on the locomotive. As a result, 90 people died and 109 people were injured and were hospitalized. The bridge had to be completely removed, and a whole week passed before the railway line under it was back in operation. The bridge was rebuilt and put into operation only a month later.
After two trials, the locomotive driver was found not guilty on charges of murder. The Department of Transportation determined that he did not slow down after passing two warning signals, so he could not stop after the danger signal. Ultimately, the Department of Transportation concluded that an automatic warning system could have prevented the collision.
6. Train collision in India
The Firozabad train derailment occurred in India in 1995 when two trains - the Kalindi Express and the Purshottam Express - collided near Firozabad. The Purshottam Express hit the Kalindi Express from behind when the latter came to a halt due to jammed brakes, which were in this condition after he hit the cow. During the collision, almost all the people were asleep. About 200 people died and about 200 more were injured.
SourcePhoto 7Train Collision Caused by Race Races
The caption written by William Middleton for this photo in his book The Interurban Era reads:
"Two Fonda, Johnstown, & Gloversville trains have been disgraced after their misplaced competition for a spot at the Gloversville, New York railroad yard."
Source 8Amazing train derailment with the loss of only one human life
The tragedy took place in a peaceful and picturesque place, in the heart of the Lake District (Lake District).
On a cold, rainy evening in February 2007, the tranquility of a farm near the tiny village of Grayrigg was shattered when the Virgin Pendolino London to Glasgow Express derailed the West Coast Main Line from London to Glasgow. (West Coast Main Line). In just a few seconds, eight cars of the Class 390 high-speed train derailed, injuring 86 passengers and two crew members out of the 105 people who were on the train at that time. This was due to the fact that the locomotive, traveling at a speed of approximately 153 kilometers per hour, derailed and dragged the train cars behind it, which scattered along the earthen embankment.
As a result, only one person died - 84-year-old Margaret "Peggy" Maysson (Margaret Peggy Masson), who survived the incident itself, but died later in the hospital.
TASS-DOSIER. On August 11, 2017, in Egypt, near the city of Alexandria, a passenger train heading to Cairo crashed at full speed into a train that had stopped due to a breakdown, following the route Port Said - Alexandria.
According to the Egyptian Ministry of Health, 41 people were killed in the collision, and 132 were injured.
The TASS-DOSIER editors have prepared material on major railway accidents that have occurred in various countries of the world.
January 3, 1944 near the city of León (Spain), about 500 people died during a collision of two trains in a tunnel.
August 6, 1952 at the Drovnino station on the Western Railway in the Mozhaisk district of the Moscow region, a high-speed train collided with a horse, causing the train to derail. 109 people died.
October 8, 1952 two trains collided in London (UK), and 30 minutes later a third train crashed into them. 112 people died, 340 people were injured.
June 6, 1981 near the city of Patna in the state of Bihar (India), seven wagons of a passenger train were overturned by a hurricane from a bridge into the Bagmati River. More than 800 people died.
August 7, 1987 in the Rostov region (USSR), an electric locomotive of a freight train, having accelerated on the descent to 140 km / h, crashed into the rear cars of the passenger train Rostov-on-Don - Moscow. 106 people died, 114 were injured, material damage amounted to more than 1.5 million rubles. During the investigation, it turned out that the crash occurred due to a malfunction of the brake system as part of a freight train.
June 3, 1989 near Ufa there was the largest railway accident in the history of Russia and the USSR. At the time of the passage of two passenger trains, an explosion occurred as a result of the accident on a nearby pipeline. 575 people died, more than 600 were injured.
January 15, 1989 near the city of Dhaka (Bangladesh) as a result of a collision of passenger trains, 135 people were killed, more than a thousand were injured.
January 3, 1990 Near the city of Sukkur (Pakistan), 307 people died and 430 were injured in a collision between a passenger and freight train.
1April 6, 1990 In the state of Bihar (India), about 100 people died due to a fire in a passenger train.
June 9, 1991 over 100 people were killed and about 250 were injured in a railway accident in southern Pakistan.
September 6, 1991 near the city of Pointe-Noire (Congo), as a result of a collision between a freight train and a passenger train, more than 100 people were killed and dozens were injured.
September 22, 1994 in the province of Huila (Angola), a freight train with a large number of people on its platforms was derailed, killing 300 people and injuring 147.
August 21, 1995 In the state of Uttar Pradesh (India), about 350 people were killed and more than 400 were injured in a collision of passenger trains.
March 3, 1997 In the province of Punjab (Pakistan), 128 people died in a railway accident.
April 29, 1997 100 people died and about 300 were injured as a result of a collision of passenger trains at the Rongjiawan station in Hunan province (China).
June 3, 1998 in the federal state of Lower Saxony, near the city of Eschede (Germany), a car, breaking through a barrier, fell off a bridge onto the railway tracks. A train traveling at a speed of 200 km / h, in which there were more than 700 passengers, derailed and crashed into the support of another bridge. As a result, the bridge collapsed, and its fragments fell on the carriages of the passenger train. More than 100 people died.
November 26, 1998 In the state of Punjab (India), as a result of a railway accident, 108 people died and 230 were injured.
August 2, 1999 280 people were killed at the Gaisal station in the state of West Bengal (India) as a result of a collision between a passenger express train and a train standing at the platform.
February 20, 2002 As a result of a fire in a passenger train Cairo - Luxor (Egypt), 373 people died, 74 people were injured and burned. The cause of the incident was a short circuit in the electrical wiring of the train. This is the biggest disaster in the history of the railway transport in Egypt.
May 25, 2002 in the city of Moamba (Mozambique), a train consisting of passenger and freight cars crashed. More than 200 people died, 400 received various injuries.
June 24, 2002 In Tanzania, a collision between a passenger and freight train killed 281 people and injured about 900. The cause of the accident was the failure of the brakes of a passenger train.
September 9, 2002 In the state of Bihar (India), an express train derailed and fell off a bridge into a river. At least 150 people were killed and more than 200 people were injured.
February 18, 2004 near the city of Nishapur (Iran), when cargo trains collided, tanks with gasoline exploded. As a result of the fire, about 400 people died and 460 were injured.
April 22, 2004 Trains collided at Ryenchon station in North Korea, one of which was carrying oil, the other was carrying liquefied gas. The disaster led to a strong explosion, which killed 170 people and injured about 1,300 people.
December 26, 2004 in the area of the village of Peraliya (Sri Lanka) there was a railway accident in which about 2 thousand people died. The cause of the tragedy was an earthquake and tsunami. This disaster is considered the largest in the history of rail transport.
April 25, 2005 in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture, Fr. Honshu (Japan) derailed five of the seven cars of the high-speed train. The first car of the train crashed into a 9-storey residential building at high speed. 108 people were killed, more than 450 were injured.
1July 3, 2005 at the Gotki station in Sindh province (Pakistan), the train crashed into a train standing on the tracks. The derailed carriages blocked an adjacent track, where they were rammed by a passing express train. About 300 people were killed, more than a thousand were injured.
October 29, 2005 near the village of Valukodu in the state of Andhra Pradesh (India), a locomotive and seven carriages of a passenger train derailed and collapsed from the bridge. 200 people were killed, about 100 were injured. The accident occurred in conditions of severe flooding.
August 1, 2007 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, more than 160 people died in a train accident in Kasai province in the central part of the country.
July 10, 2011 In India, 120 km from the city of Lucknow, the capital of the state of Uttar Pradesh, a passenger train crashed. The engineer applied emergency brakes to avoid crashing into a herd of cows crossing the railroad tracks. As a result, 12 wagons and the train's locomotive derailed. 80 people died, more than 350 were injured.
July 6, 2013 in Lac-Megentique (Canada), a train of 72 oil tanks derailed from the United States to an oil refinery in Quebec. As a result of the disaster, a fire started, in which 47 residents of the city died, 30 people who were previously considered missing were declared dead. 2 thousand residents of nearby areas of the city were evacuated. The fire destroyed over 40 buildings. The total amount of damage exceeded $200 million.
July 24, 2013 in Santiago de Compostela (the administrative center of Galicia, Spain) a train from Madrid to Ferrol crashed. 80 people were killed, 178 people were injured of varying severity. The train driver took the blame, admitting that he had exceeded the speed limit on the turn.
April 22, 2014 In the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 15 wagons of a freight train with hundreds of illegal passengers derailed. 48 people were killed, about 150 were injured. The cause of the crash was exceeding a safe speed due to an engine problem in one of the two locomotives.
March 20, 2015 In India, a locomotive and two carriages of a passenger train on the Dehradun-Varanasi route derailed at Bahrawan station in Rai Bareli district (Uttar Pradesh). 58 people were killed, more than 150 people were injured. According to the Ministry of Railways of India, the accident occurred due to the fact that the train drove through a prohibitory traffic light.
August 4, 2015 The crash of two passenger trains on a bridge across the Machak River near Kharda, Madhya Pradesh, India, killed at least 32 people, left five missing and over 40 injured. The structures of the railway bridge were washed away as a result of the flood and could not withstand the weight of two trains traveling in opposite directions. The main cause of death was electric shock.
July 12, 2016 between the settlements of Corato and Andria in the vicinity of the city of Bari (region of Apulia, Italy) on a single-track railway line, a head-on collision of two passenger trains occurred. As a result, 23 people died and more than 50 people were injured.
October 21, 2016 A passenger train en route from Cameroon's capital Yaounde to the country's largest city, Douala, derailed 120 km west of the departure station. As a result, at least 79 people were killed and more than 550 people were injured of varying degrees of severity. A large number of victims and injured was caused by overcrowding on the train (the train, designed for 600 passengers, carried more than 1,300 people).
November 20, 2016 100 km south of the city of Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh, India), near the town of Pukhrayan, 14 wagons of a passenger train traveling along the route Indore - Patna derailed. As a result, 151 people died and about 200 more were injured. According to preliminary data, the cause of the accident was damage to the rail.
November 25, 2016 near the Haft Khan railway station (Iran), a passenger train en route from Tabriz to Mashhad stopped for an unknown reason, after which another passenger train crashed into it. As a result, five wagons derailed, two wagons caught fire. At least 36 people were killed and about 70 others were injured.
January 21, 2017 In India, the high-speed passenger express train Hirakhand, en route from Jagdalpur to Bhubaneswar, derailed near Kuneru station (Vizianagaram district, Andhra Pradesh). The diesel locomotive and nine wagons overturned. As a result of the disaster and the stampede that occurred in the cars, 41 people died and 68 were injured.
With the development of scientific and technological progress, not only the burden on the environment increases, but also the level of danger to humans. Increasing the speed of life requires increased speeds of movement. Horse-drawn carriages were replaced by cars, high-speed trains and jet airliners. News of tragedies on the roads and in the air, railway accidents frighten and horrify. But despite the two-hundred-year history of the development of railway transport, it still remains the safest. Whether this is so and what is the probability of being at the epicenter of a railway accident, we will talk in this article.
Statistics and Poll
Statistics are tricky things. A variety of indicators can be taken as evaluation criteria: the number of victims per kilometer or per man-hours. Here are the statistics on the ratio of victims to the number of passengers. In this assessment, the railway is in third place in terms of traffic safety. It yields to water transport and, paradoxically, to aviation. But polls of the population stubbornly give completely different figures. Only 15% of respondents believe that they can get into an accident on the railway transport. While concerns about road transport are expressed by about 50% of respondents. And 85% of respondents are afraid to use the services of modern aviation.
Causes have no nationality
Two centuries of railway existence show that railway accidents have no nationality. Separately, it is worth considering terrorist acts, and we will talk about them separately. The causes of tragedies leading to railway accidents and catastrophes most often include the following:
Dangerous Leaders
When analyzing the largest railway accidents, a combination of several factors attracts attention. And besides, each such tragedy is a unique case, a tragic combination of circumstances. But the statistics are ruthless: 25% of railway accidents occur as a result of train derailment. The same amount is accounted for by collisions and collisions of railway transport with other vehicles (horse, automobile and even bicycle). Fires, explosions and equipment failure take about 10%, and the rest is the human factor and control errors, which lead to trains leaving on busy tracks and direct collisions.
The very first accident
As the story goes, the first railroad accident happened on November 8, 1833 in the suburb of Hightstown (New Jersey, USA). A broken axle caused the Camden and Emboy passenger train to derail. By coincidence, the sixth president of the United States of America, John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), was on the train. Among many passengers, he was injured, and two passengers died. An account for the victims of railway accidents was opened and continues to this day.
Top world disasters
Throughout the history of the existence of the railway, many tragic events have occurred. Let's list the three most significant world tragedies in terms of the number of dead passengers.
Peralia (Sri Lanka). This tragedy, which happened on December 26, 2004, is today considered the deadliest. The number of victims is unknown, official sources give a figure of 2,000 people. The train "Queen of the Sea" was swept away by a tsunami wave, thirty-ton cars, two of which were swept into the ocean, and an eighty-ton locomotive was thrown 50 meters. Rescuers reached the train only on the third day. One and a half hundred passengers miraculously survived.
Al-Ayyat (Egypt). This train accident happened on February 20, 2002. The train driver did not see the outbreak of fire in one car, and the fire very quickly engulfed seven cars overcrowded with passengers. People jumped out of the flaming train on the move, because it drove another 10 kilometers. According to official figures, 380 people died, about a thousand were severely burned and injured.
Bihar (India). In this case, the cause of the tragedy is love for the smaller brothers. The train driver made a sharp stop to avoid a collision with animals. As a result, the entire train fell into the river. The tragedy of August 6, 1981 claimed the lives of all who rode this train - 800 people.
Danger lurks not only for passengers
Nishapur (Iran). The train with tanks of sulfur, gasoline, fertilizers and cotton went off the rails.
In the village of Khayam, where the train entered on February 18, 2004, in addition to firefighters, many onlookers, politicians, and journalists flocked. And then the cars detonated: the explosion was equal to 180 tons of TNT. About 300 people died, up to 500 were injured, and the explosion was heard 70 kilometers from the epicenter.
The worst terrorist attack
Terrible catastrophes on the railway are the longed-for dream of terrorists. This is how suicide bombers decided to mark 911 days after the September 11, 2001 tragedy with four explosions in electric trains in Madrid (Spain). Explosions thundered on March 11, 2004 and claimed the lives of 192 citizens from 17 countries of the world. About two thousand people suffered. No terrorist organization has ever claimed responsibility for these explosions.
The worst disaster in the USSR
There was no other such tragedy either on the territory of the Soviet Union or the CIS countries. And the cause of the railway accident near Ufa is an accident on the hydrocarbon pipeline Siberia - Ural - Volga region, which led to the formation of a dense gas-air mixture in the area where trains pass. 18 carriages of the train Adler - Novosibirsk then, on June 4, 1989, collided with the same passenger train of 20 carriages going in the opposite direction. 1,284 passengers were at the epicenter of the tragedy, including almost 400 children. A tragic accident led to the fact that these trains met - one was late for technical reasons, and the second made an emergency stop (dropped off a woman in labor). When they caught up on the section of the Ulyu - Telyak - Osh road, a spark from the wheels led to an explosion from 300 tons of TNT to 12 kilotons. For information - the explosion in Hiroshima was 16 kilotons of TNT. Electric locomotives and 38 wagons were simply destroyed. The shock wave threw 11 wagons off the tracks. Centuries-old pine trees burned down like matches. According to official data, 575 passengers died in a railway accident (1989), almost a thousand were injured of varying severity and burned. Residents of the city of Asha, located 10 kilometers from the explosion, throughout the rescue operation, which lasted almost a week, helped the rescuers and the victims. Although in the city itself, glass in residential buildings was shattered by a blast wave, and the fire from the conflagration that engulfed 250 hectares of forest was visible from a distance of 100 kilometers.
The death of athletes
This railway accident near Ufa claimed the lives of 9 hockey players of the Chelyabinsk Traktor team. These boys, born in 1973, were candidates for the youth team of the Soviet Union and gold medalists in many tournaments. Since 1989, an annual hockey tournament has been held in Chelyabinsk in memory of the fallen champions, which is one of the most prestigious among youth teams. A memorial was erected at the site of the tragedy (1992), and a monument to the victims was opened in the Novosibirsk Carriage Depot (2009). And in Russia, the development of the direction of railway hospitals for disaster medicine is becoming more widespread. At the site of the tragedy, electric trains stop today to honor the memory of all those who died in this terrible disaster.
A year earlier
Exactly one year before this disaster, on June 4, 1988, due to non-compliance with the rules for transporting hazardous substances, an explosion occurred at Arzamas station (Gorky region) at 09.32 in the morning. Three wagons with hexogen exploded, and this is 118 tons of explosive. The funnel from the explosion was 26 meters in diameter. 151 residential buildings were destroyed, more than 800 families were left homeless. In addition to the completely destroyed canvas (250 meters), 2 hospitals, 49 kindergartens, 14 schools were damaged. 91 people died, including 17 children.
Railway accidents in Russia: 2017
January 18th. The driver of the car left in front of the train at the crossing. Even with emergency braking, a collision could not be avoided. The driver and passenger of the car died.
January 30. A passenger car collided with an electric train in the Moscow region. Three people in the car were killed.
March, 3rd. Amur region - a collision of a truck and a freight train, the wagons of which went off the tracks. Two passengers and the driver of the car were killed.
26 March. As a result of a collision of two trains of the Uchalinsky Mining and Processing Plant (Bashkiria), two tanks containing diesel fuel derailed. One person was injured and four died.
April 8th. The Moscow-Brest train collided with an electric train near Moscow. Three train cars and a train locomotive derailed. Of the 50 injured, 12 passengers required hospitalization.
9th of September. A KAMAZ and a passenger train collided at a crossing in the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug. Two people died in the hospital, 20 passengers were injured.
Summing up
Tragedies and catastrophes are inevitable with the development of technological progress. Increasing speeds of movement bring potential danger into our lives. Everyone has to decide for himself which transport to choose for movement. As the floorboard says - what will be, will not be avoided. Let there be fewer worries in our life, and let troubles bypass us and people dear to us. And for this - be a careful passenger and follow the rules that are written to ensure safety. And for machinists and maintenance personnel, the priority of tasks should include compliance with the rules for servicing mechanisms and labor protection rules.
Original taken from Schnause at age 25. June 4, 1989 Catastrophe in Chelyabinsk.
June 4, 2014 marks the 25th anniversary of the catastrophe on the railway transport, monstrous in scale and in terms of victims. The disaster on the stretch Asha - Ulu Telyak is the largest disaster in the history of Russia and the USSR that occurred on June 4, 1989, 11 km from the city of Asha. At the time of the passage of two passenger trains, there was a powerful explosion of an unlimited cloud of fuel-air mixture formed as a result of an accident on the Siberia-Ural-Volga region pipeline passing nearby. 575 people were killed (according to other sources 645), more than 600 were injured.
The disaster is considered the largest in the history of the USSR and Russia.
In trains No. 211 Novosibirsk-Adler (20 cars) and No. 212 Adler-Novosibirsk (18 cars) there were 1284 passengers, including 383 children and 86 people of train and locomotive crews.
The train from Novosibirsk was late that night for technical reasons, and shortly before the tragedy, the oncoming train stopped at an intermediate station for an urgent disembarkation - a woman went into labor right in the car.
Significant passengers on their way to Adler were already looking forward to a quiet vacation at sea. They were going to meet those who, on the contrary, were already returning from vacation. The explosion that took place in the middle of the night is estimated by experts as equivalent to an explosion of three hundred tons of TNT. According to unofficial data, the power of the explosion in Ulu-Telyak was approximately the same as in Hiroshima - about 12 kilotons.
The explosion destroyed 38 wagons and two electric locomotives. 11 wagons were thrown off the tracks by the shock wave, of which 7 were completely burned out. The remaining 26 wagons were burned on the outside and burned out inside. Centuries-old trees were felled within a radius of three kilometers around the epicenter.
350 meters of railway lines and 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines were destroyed. The fire caused by the explosion covered an area of about 250 hectares. Later, the investigation will find out that the root cause of the gas leak and the explosion was poor-quality welding of the gas pipeline. The result is a breach of the tightness of the seams. The gas is heavier than air, and there is a big low in this place. An explosive mixture formed and the trains entered a completely gassed zone, where there was quite a small spark for a powerful explosion.
In the course of operation in the period from 1985 to 1989, 50 major accidents and failures occurred on the product pipeline, which, however, did not lead to human casualties. After the accident near Ufa, the product pipeline was not restored and was liquidated.
Memoirs of an eyewitness.
June 4, 1989. It was very hot these days. The weather was sunny and the air was warm. It was 30 degrees outside. My parents worked on the railway, and on June 7, Mom and I rode the “memory” train from the station. Ufa to o.p. 1710 km. By that time, the wounded and the dead had already been taken out, the railway communication had already been established, but what I saw 2 hours after departure ... I will never forget! There was nothing a few kilometers before the epicenter of the explosion. Everything is burned! Where once there was a forest, grass, bushes, now everything was covered with ashes. It's like napalm, which burned everything, leaving nothing in return. Mangled wagons lay everywhere, and there were fragments of mattresses and sheets on miraculously surviving trees. Fragments of human bodies were also scattered everywhere ... and this is the smell, it was hot outside and the cadaverous smell was everywhere. And tears, grief, grief, grief...
An explosion of a large volume of gas distributed in space had the character of a volumetric explosion. The power of the explosion was estimated at 300 tons of TNT. According to other estimates, the power of a volumetric explosion could reach 10 kilotons of TNT, which is comparable to the power of a nuclear explosion in Hiroshima (12.5 kilotons). The force of the explosion was such that the shock wave shattered windows in the city of Asha, located more than 10 km from the scene. The column of flame was visible for more than 100 km. 350 meters of railway lines and 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines were destroyed. The fire caused by the explosion covered an area of about 250 hectares.
The official version claims that a gas leak from the product pipeline became possible due to damage caused to it by an excavator bucket during its construction in October 1985, four years before the disaster. The leak started 40 minutes before the explosion.
According to another version, the cause of the accident was the corrosive effect on the outer part of the pipe of electric leakage currents, the so-called "stray currents" of the railway. 2-3 weeks before the explosion, a micro fistula formed, then, as a result of cooling of the pipe, a crack growing in length appeared at the place of gas expansion. Liquid condensate soaked the soil at the depth of the trench, without going outside, and gradually descended down the slope to the railway.
When two trains met, probably as a result of braking, a spark arose, which caused the gas to detonate. But most likely the cause of the gas detonation was an accidental spark from under the pantograph of one of the locomotives.
It has already been 22 years since that monstrous catastrophe near Ulu-Telyak happened. More than 600 people died. And how many people were left crippled? Many have remained missing. The real culprits of this disaster have not been found. The trial lasted more than 6 years, only the “switchmen” were punished. After all, this tragedy could have been avoided, if not the carelessness and negligence that we encountered then. The drivers reported that there was a strong smell of gas, but no action was taken. We should not forget about this tragedy, about the pain that people endured... Until now, we are notified every day about one or another sad incident. Where more than 600 lives were interrupted by chance. For their relatives and friends, this place on the land of Bashkortostan is the 1710th kilometer by rail ...
In addition, I give excerpts from Soviet newspapers that wrote about the disaster at that time:
From the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Council of Ministers of the USSR June 3 at 23:14 Moscow time on the liquefied gas pipeline, in the immediate vicinity of the Chelyabinsk-Ufa railway section, as a result of the accident, a gas leak occurred. During the passage of two oncoming passenger trains with the destination Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk, a large explosion and fire occurred. There are numerous victims.
At about 11:10 p.m. Moscow time, one of the drivers radioed that they had entered a heavily polluted area. After that, the connection was cut off ... As we now know, after that there was an explosion. His strength was such that all the windows on the central estate of the collective farm "Red Sunrise" flew out. And this is a few kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion. We also saw a heavy wheeled pair, which found itself in an instant in the forest at a distance of more than five hundred meters from the railway. The rails twisted into unthinkable loops. And then what about the people. A lot of people died. From some, only a pile of ashes remained. It is difficult to write about this, but the train to Adler included two carriages with children going to the pioneer camp. Most of them burned down.
Disaster on the Trans-Siberian.
Here is what the Izvestia correspondent was told at the Ministry of Railways: The pipeline on which the disaster occurred runs about a kilometer from the Ufa-Chelyabinsk highway (Kuibyshev railway). At the time of the explosion and the resulting fire, passenger trains 211 (Novosibirsk-Adler) and 212 (Adler-Novosibirsk) were moving towards each other. The impact of the blast wave and flame threw fourteen wagons off the track, destroyed the contact network, damaged communication lines and the railway track for several hundred meters. The fire spread to the trains, and the fire was put out within a few hours. According to preliminary data, the explosion occurred due to a rupture of the Western Siberia-Ural pipeline near the Asha railway station. Raw materials for the chemical plants of Kuibyshev are distilled through it. Chelyabinsk. Bashkiria ... Its length is 1860 kilometers. According to experts who are now working at the accident site, there was a leak of liquefied propane-butane gas in this area. Here the product pipeline runs through the mountains. For a certain time, the gas accumulated in two deep hollows and, for unknown reasons, exploded. The front of the rising flame was about one and a half to two kilometers. It was possible to extinguish the fire directly on the product pipeline only after all the hydrocarbons that had collected at the rupture site had burned out. It turned out that long before the explosion, residents of nearby settlements felt a strong smell of gas in the air. It spread over a distance of approximately 4 to 8 kilometers. Such reports were received from the population around 21:00 local time, and the tragedy, as you know, occurred later. However, instead of finding and eliminating the leak, someone (while the investigation is ongoing) added pressure to the pipeline and the gas continued to spread through the hollows.
An explosion on a summer night.
As a result of the leak, the gas gradually accumulated in the hollow, its concentration increased. Experts believe that the cargo and passenger trains passing alternately with a powerful air flow paved a “corridor” that was safe for themselves, and the trouble was pushed aside. According to this version, it might have moved away this time as well, since the trains "Novosibirsk - Adler" and "Adler - Novosibirsk" according to the railway schedule should not have met on this section. But by a tragic accident, on the train to Adler, one of the women went into premature labor. The doctors who were among the passengers gave her first aid. At the nearest station, the train was delayed for 15 minutes in order to transfer the mother and child to the called ambulance. And when the fateful meeting took place in a polluted area, the "corridor effect" did not work. To ignite the explosive mixture, a tiny spark from under the wheels thrown out the window of a smoldering cigarette or a lit match was enough.
On June 6, a meeting of the government commission headed by Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR GG Vedernikov took place in the government commission in Ufa. Minister of Health of the RSFSR A.I. Potapov reported to the commission on urgent measures to provide assistance to the victims of the disaster on the railway. He said that at 7 am on June 6, 503 of the wounded, including 115 children, were in medical facilities in Ufa, 299 people are in serious condition. In medical institutions of Chelyabinsk - 149 victims, including 40 children, 299 people are in serious condition. As was reported at the meeting, according to preliminary data, about 1,200 people were on both trains at the time of the disaster. It is still difficult to give a more accurate figure, due to the fact that the number of children under the age of five traveling on trains, for whom, according to the current regulation, railway tickets were not purchased, and possible passengers who also did not purchase tickets, is unknown.
Before the crash, trains 211 and 212 had never met at this point. The delay of train No. 212 for technical reasons and the stop of train No. 211 at an intermediate station for the disembarkation of a woman who had begun childbirth, led these two passenger trains to the fateful place at the same time.
This is what a cold news bulletin sounds like.
The weather was windless. The gas escaping from above filled the entire lowland. The driver of the freight train, who shortly before the explosion proceeded to the 1710th kilometer, transmitted by communication that there was a strong gas contamination in this place. He was promised to...
On the stretch Asha - Ulu-Telyak near the Zmeinaya Gorka, the ambulances almost missed each other, but there was a terrible explosion, followed by another one. Flames filled everything around. The air itself became fire. By inertia, the trains rolled out of the zone of intense burning. The tail cars of both trains were thrown out of the track. At the trailer “zero” car, the roof was torn off by an explosive wave, those who were lying on the upper shelves were thrown onto the embankment.
The clock found on the ashes showed 1.10 local time.
A giant flash was seen for tens of kilometers
Until now, the mystery of this terrible catastrophe worries astrologers, scientists, and experts. How did it happen that two late twin trains Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk met in a dangerous place where a product pipeline leaked? Why was there a spark? Why did trains get into the heat, the most crowded with people in the summer, and not, for example, freight trains? And why did the gas explode a kilometer from the leak? Until now, the number of dead is not known for certain - in the cars in Soviet times, when the names were not put on the tickets, there could be a huge number of "hares" traveling to the blessed south and returning back.
Flames shot up into the sky, it became bright as day, we thought we dropped an atomic bomb, - says Anatoly Bezrukov, a district police officer of the Iglinsky police department, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - They rushed to the conflagration in cars, on tractors. Equipment on a steep slope could not climb. They began to climb the slope - all around the pines stand like burnt matches. Below they saw torn metal, fallen poles, power transmission masts, pieces of bodies ... One woman hung on a birch tree with her stomach open. An old man crawled along the slope from the fiery mess, coughing. How many years have passed, and he still stands before my eyes. Then I saw that the man was burning like gas with a blue flame.
At one in the morning, teenagers returning from a disco in the village of Kazayak arrived to help the villagers. The children themselves among the hissing metal helped along with the adults.
We tried to take out the children in the first place, - says Ramil Khabibullin, a resident of the village of Kazayak. - Adults were simply dragged away from the fire. And they moan, cry, ask to cover with something. What will you hide? They took off their clothes.
The wounded, in a state of shock, crawled into the windbreak, looking for them by groans and screams.
They took a person by the arms, by the legs, and his skin remained in his hands ... - said the driver of the Ural, Viktor Titlin, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - All night, until the morning, they took the victims to the hospital in Asha.
The driver of the state farm bus, Marat Sharifullin, made three trips, and then began to shout: “I won’t go any more, I bring only corpses!” On the way, the children screamed, asked for water, burned skin stuck to the seats, many did not survive the road.
Cars did not go uphill, they had to carry the wounded on themselves, ”says Marat Yusupov, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - Carried on shirts, blankets, seat covers. I remember one guy from the village of Maisky, he, such a healthy man, endured thirty people. All in blood, but did not stop.
Sergey Stolyarov made three trips on an electric locomotive with wounded people. At the Ulu-Telyak station, he, a driver with two months of experience, missed the 212th ambulance, went on a freight train after him. A few kilometers later I saw a huge flame. Having unhooked the oil tanks, he began to slowly drive up to the overturned wagons. On the embankment, the wires of the contact network, torn off by the blast wave, curled like snakes. Having taken the burnt people into the cab, Stolyarov moved to the siding, returned to the crash site with the platform already attached. He picked up children, women, men who had become helpless, and loaded, loaded ... He returned home - his shirt stood like a stake from someone else's dried blood.
All the village equipment came, they were transported on tractors, - recalled the chairman of the Krasny Voskhod collective farm, Sergei Kosmakov. - The wounded were sent to a rural boarding school, where their children bandaged ...
Specialized assistance came much later - after one and a half to two hours.
At 1.45 a.m., a call came to the console that a wagon was on fire near Ulu-Telyak,” says Mikhail Kalinin, senior doctor on the ambulance shift in Ufa. - Ten minutes later, they clarified: the entire train burned out. They removed all the ambulances on duty from the line, equipped them with gas masks. No one knew where to go, Ulu-Telyak is 90 km from Ufa. The cars just went to the torch ...
We got out of the car to the ashes, the first thing we see is a doll and a severed leg ... - said the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev. - How many anesthetic injections had to be done - the mind is incomprehensible. When we set off with the wounded children, a woman ran up to me with a girl in her arms: “Doctor, take it. The baby's mother and father both died. There were no seats in the car, I put the girl on my lap. She was wrapped up to her chin in a sheet, her head was all burned, her hair curled into caked rings - like a lamb, and she smelled like a roast lamb ... I still can’t forget this girl. On the way she told me that her name was Jeanne and that she was three years old. My daughter was the same age at the time. Now Zhanna should be already 21, quite a bride ...
Zhanna, who was taken out of the affected area by the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev, we found. In the book of memory. Akhmadeeva Zhanna Floridovna, born in 1986, was not destined to become a bride. At the age of three, she died in the Children's Republican Hospital in Ufa.
Trees fell like in a vacuum
The place of the tragedy smelled sharply of a putrid smell. The wagons, for some reason rusty in color, lay a few meters from the tracks, bizarrely flattened and curved. It’s even hard to imagine what temperature could make iron wriggle like that. It is amazing that in this fire, on the ground that turned into coke, where electrical poles and sleepers were uprooted, people could still remain alive!
The military later determined that the power of the explosion was 20 megatons, which corresponds to half of the atomic bomb that the Americans dropped on Hiroshima, - said Sergey Kosmakov, chairman of the Krasny Voskhod village council. - We ran to the place of the explosion - the trees fell, as if in a vacuum - to the center of the explosion. The shock wave was so strong that windows were shattered in all houses within a radius of 12 kilometers. Pieces from the wagons we found at a distance of six kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion.
Patients were brought in dump trucks, side by side in trucks: alive, unconscious, already dead ... - recalls resuscitator Vladislav Zagrebenko. - Loaded in the dark. Sorted according to the principle of military medicine. Seriously wounded - with a hundred percent burns - on the grass. There is no time for pain relief, this is the law: if you help one, you will lose twenty. When the hospital went through the floors, the feeling was that we were at war. In the wards, in the corridors, in the hall, there were black people with severe burns. I've never seen anything like this, even though I worked in intensive care.
In Chelyabinsk, children from the 107th school got on the ill-fated train, going to Moldova to work in a labor camp in the vineyards.
Interestingly, the head teacher of the school, Tatyana Viktorovna Filatova, even before the departure, ran to the head of the station to convince him that, for safety reasons, the car with children should be placed at the beginning of the train. I didn’t convince ... Their “zero” car was hitched to the very end.
In the morning we found out that only one platform remained from our trailer car, - says the director of the 107th school of Chelyabinsk, Irina Konstantinova. - Out of 54 people, 9 survived. The head teacher - Tatyana Viktorovna was lying on the bottom shelf with her 5-year-old son. So both of them died. Neither our military instructor, Yuri Gerasimovich Tulupov, nor the children's favorite teacher, Irina Mikhailovna Strelnikova, was found. One high school student was identified only by his watch, the other by the mesh in which his parents put groceries for him on the road.
My heart ached when a train arrived with relatives of the victims, said Anatoly Bezrukov. - They peered with hope at the wagons crumpled like pieces of paper. Elderly women crawled with plastic bags in their hands, hoping to find at least something left from their relatives.
After the wounded were taken away, the burnt and mangled pieces of bodies - arms, legs, shoulders - were collected throughout the forest, removed from the trees and put on a stretcher. By evening, when the refrigerators arrived, there were about 20 such stretchers filled with human remains. But even in the evening, civil defense soldiers continued to extract the remnants of flesh fused into iron from the cars with cutters. In a separate pile they put things found in the area - children's toys and books, bags and suitcases, blouses and trousers, for some reason whole and unharmed, not even scorched.
Salavat Abdulin, the father of the deceased high school student Irina, found her hair clip in the ashes, which he himself repaired before the trip, her shirt.
There was no daughter on the list of the living, - he will recall later. We spent three days looking for her in hospitals. No trace. And then my wife and I went to the refrigerators ... There was one girl there. Similar in age to our daughter. There was no head. Black as a frying pan. I thought I would recognize her by her legs, she danced with me, she was a ballerina, but there were no legs either ...
Two mothers claimed for one child at once
And in Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Samara, places in hospitals were urgently vacated. To take the wounded out of the Asha and Iglino hospitals in Ufa, a helicopter school was used. Cars landed in the center of the city in Gafuri Park behind the circus - this place in Ufa is still called the "heliport" to this day. Cars took off every three minutes. By 11 am, all the victims were taken to city hospitals.
- The first patient came to us at 6 hours 58 minutes, - said the head of the burn center in the city of Ufa, Radik Medykhatovich Zinatullin. - From eight in the morning until lunch - there was a massive flow of victims. The burns were deep, almost all had burns of the upper respiratory tract. More than 70% of the body was burned in half of the victims. Our center had just opened, and there were enough antibiotics, blood products, and a fibrin film, which is applied to the burnt surface, in stock. Teams of doctors from Leningrad and Moscow arrived for dinner.
There were many children among the victims. I remember one boy had two mothers, each of whom was sure that her son was on the bed ...
American doctors, as they learned, flew in from the States, making a detour, they said: "No more than 40 percent will survive." As in a nuclear explosion, when the main injury is precisely a burn. Half of those whom they considered doomed, we pulled out. I remember a paratrooper from Chebarkul, Edik Ashirov, a jeweler by trade. The Americans said that he should be transferred to drugs and that's it. Like, still not a tenant. And we saved him! He was discharged one of the last, in September.
An unbearable situation reigned in the headquarters these days. Women clung to the slightest hope and did not leave the lists for a long time, falling into a swoon there.
Arriving from Dnepropetrovsk on the second day after the tragedy, the father and the young girl, unlike other relatives, shone with happiness. They came to their son and husband, in a young family - two kids.
We don't need lists, they dismiss it. We know he survived. Pravda wrote on the first page that he saved children. We know what lies in the 21st hospital.
Indeed, the young officer Andrei Dontsov, who was returning home, became famous when he pulled children out of burning cars. But the publication indicated that the hero had 98% burns.
The wife and father shift from foot to foot, they want to quickly leave the mournful headquarters, where people are crying.
Take it to the morgue, - says the phone number of the 21st hospital.
Nadya Shugaeva, a milkmaid from the Novosibirsk region, suddenly starts laughing hysterically.
Found, found!
The attendants are trying to smile painfully. I found my father and brother, sister and young nephew. Found ... in the lists of the dead.
The switchmen were responsible for the disaster.
When the wind still carried the ashes of those burned alive, powerful equipment was driven to the crash site. Fearing an epidemic due to unburied fragments of bodies smeared on the ground and beginning to decompose, they hastened to raze the scorched lowland of 200 hectares to the ground.
Builders answered for the death of people, for terrible burns and injuries of more than a thousand people.
From the very beginning, the investigation came to very important people: the leaders of the branch design institute, who approved the project with violations. A charge was also brought against the Deputy Minister of the Oil Industry Dongaryan, who, with his instruction, due to cost savings, canceled telemetry - devices that control the operation of the entire highway. There was a helicopter that flew around the entire route, it was canceled, there was a lineman - the lineman was also removed.
On December 26, 1992, the trial took place. It turned out that the gas leak from the overpass occurred due to a crack caused to it four years before the disaster, in October 1985, by an excavator bucket during construction work. The product pipeline was backfilled with mechanical damage. The case was sent for further investigation.
Six years later, the Supreme Court of Bashkiria issued a sentence - all the defendants were sentenced to two years in a colony-settlement. The foreman, foreman, craftsmen, and builders were in the dock. "Shooters".
Afghans worked in the morgue.
The hardest work was undertaken by the soldiers-internationalists. The Afghans volunteered to help the special services where even experienced doctors could not stand it. The corpses of the dead did not fit in the Ufa morgue on Tsvetochnaya Street, and the human remains were stored in refrigerated trucks. Considering that it was unbearably hot outside, the smell around the makeshift glaciers was unbearable, and flies flocked from all around. This work required endurance and physical strength from the volunteers, all arriving dead had to be placed on hastily knocked together shelves, tagged, sorted. Many could not stand it, shuddering in vomiting convulsions.
Relatives, distraught with grief, looking for their children, did not notice anything around, peering intently at the charred fragments of bodies. Moms and dads, grandparents, aunts and uncles, had wild dialogues:
This is not our Lenochka? they said, crowding around the black piece of meat.
No, our Lenochka had wrinkles on her arms ...
How the parents managed to identify their own body remained a mystery to those around them.
In order not to injure relatives and protect them from visiting the morgue, terrible photo albums were brought to the headquarters, placing on the pages pictures from different angles of fragments of unidentified bodies. In this terrible collection of death there were pages with a stamp - "identified." However, many still went to refrigerators, hoping that the photos were lying. And on the guys who had recently come from a real war, suffering fell upon them, which they had not seen when fighting with dushmans. Often, the guys provided first aid to those who fainted and were on the verge of insanity from grief, or, with impassive faces, helped turn their charred bodies over.
You can’t revive the dead, despair came when the living began to arrive, the Afghans later said, talking about the most difficult experiences.
The lucky ones were themselves
There were also funny cases.
In the morning, a man from the Novosibirsk train came to the village council, with a briefcase, in a suit, in a tie - not a single scratch, - said the district police officer Anatoly Bezrukov. “But he doesn’t remember how he got out of the flaming train.” Lost the night in the forest in unconsciousness.
There were stragglers from the train and to the headquarters.
Are you looking for me? - asked the guy who looked into the mournful place at the railway station.
Why are we looking for you? - surprised there, but memorized looked into the lists.
There is! - the young man was delighted, having found his name in the column of the missing.
Alexander Kuznetsov went on a spree a few hours before the tragedy. He went out to drink beer, but he does not remember how the ill-fated train left. I spent a day at the half-station, and only after sobering up, I found out about what had happened. I got to Ufa, to report that I was alive. The young man's mother at that time methodically went around the morgues, dreaming of finding at least something from her son to bury. Mother and son went home together.
Subordination failed at the site of the explosion
Soldiers working on the tracks were given 100 grams of alcohol each. It is hard to imagine how much metal and charred human flesh they had to shovel. 11 wagons were thrown off the track, 7 of them were completely burned down. People worked hard, ignoring the heat, the stench, and the almost physical horror of death that hovered in this sticky syrup.
What, uh…ate? shouts a young soldier with an autogen to an elderly man in uniform.
Colonel General GO carefully lifts his leg from the human jaw.
Sorry, - he mutters in confusion and hides in the headquarters, located in the nearest tent.
In this episode, all the conflicting emotions experienced by those present: both anger at human weakness before the elements, and embarrassment - a quiet joy that it is not their remains that are being collected, and horror mixed with stupefaction - when there is a lot of death - it no longer causes violent despair.
At the scene of the tragedy, the railway workers found huge sums of money and valuables. All of them were handed over to the state, including a passbook for 10,000 rubles. And two days later it turned out that a teenager from Ashina had been arrested for looting. The three managed to escape. They, while the rest were saving the living, plucked gold jewelry from the dead, along with burnt fingers and ears. If the bastard had not been closed under heavy guard in Iglino, outraged local residents would have torn him to shreds. Young cops shrugged:
If they knew that the criminal would have to be protected ...
Chelyabinsk lost hockey hope.
The one hundred and seventh school of Chelyabinsk lost 45 people near Ufa, the sports club "Tractor" - a youth team of hockey players, two-time champions of the country.
Only goalkeeper Borya Tortunov was forced to stay at home: his grandmother broke her arm.
Of the ten hockey players - champions of the Union among the combined regions - only one Alexander Sychev survived, who later played for the Mechel club. The pride of the team - striker Artem Masalov, defenders Seryozha Genergard, Andrey Kulazhenkin, goalkeeper Oleg Devyatov were not found at all. The youngest of the hockey team, Andrey Shevchenko, lived the longest of all the burnt guys, five days. On June 15, he would have celebrated his sixteenth birthday.
“My husband and I managed to see him,” says Andrey's mother, Natalya Antonovna. - We found him according to the lists in the intensive care unit of the 21st hospital in Ufa. - He lay like a mummy - all in bandages, his face was gray-brown, his neck was all swollen. On the plane, when we took him to Moscow, he kept asking: “Where are the guys?” In the 13th hospital - a branch of the Institute. Vishnevsky, we wanted to christen him, but did not have time. Doctors injected him with holy water three times through a catheter... He left us on the day of the Ascension of the Lord - he died quietly, unconscious.
The Tractor Club, a year after the tragedy, organized a tournament dedicated to the memory of the dead hockey players, which has become traditional. The goalkeeper of the lost team "Tractor-73" Boris Tortunov, who then remained at home because of his grandmother, became a two-time champion of the country and the European Cup. On his initiative, the pupils of the "Tractor" school raised money for prizes to the participants of the tournament, which, according to tradition, are given to the mothers and fathers of the dead children.
The explosion destroyed 37 wagons and two electric locomotives, of which 7 wagons burned down completely, 26 burned out from the inside, 11 wagons were torn off and thrown off the tracks by the shock wave. According to official figures, 258 corpses were found at the accident site, 806 people received burns and injuries of varying severity, of which 317 died in hospitals. In total, 575 people died, 623 were injured.
On July 31, 1815, the Philadelphia disaster occurred, which was the first railroad disaster in history. We decided to bring a list of the worst disasters on the railroad in history.
It happened on July 31, 1815 during the test of the Mechanical Traveler steam locomotive. The train developed a low speed and in order to impress the public, the creators decided to increase it by increasing the pressure in the boiler tank. The ensuing explosion killed 16 people. Among the dead were mainly working personnel, but a few outside observers were also hooked. In some sources, this disaster is not considered a railway accident, since it did not occur on the main road, but at a special testing ground. Be that as it may, the Philadelphia railroad accident has remained in history in first place in terms of the number of deaths from the explosion of a steam boiler.
On May 8, 1842, the Versailles railway accident occurred, the victims of which were more than fifty people. A terrible incident happened for the reason that the train derailed due to a malfunction in the axle. During the incident, the carriages were overcrowded with people, as the train was moving from Versailles to after the mass festivities taking place in the city. By such a terrible coincidence, the number of victims turned out to be so colossal. After the first car derailed, the pusher at the tail of the train continued to move, which caused a fire.
It happened on October 22, 1875. One locomotive transported both people and oil, in conditions of poor visibility, the driver did not see the traffic lights. By coincidence, the train flew onto an unfinished section of the rails, after which it went downhill. Oil tanks caught fire, resulting in huge casualties. According to official figures, 70 people died.
On December 28, 1879, one of the largest catastrophes occurred on the bridge over the Tay River. Due to gusty heavy winds, several spans flew out of the bridge, which led to the train falling into the water. All 75 passengers in the carriages were killed.
On July 16, 1945, the worst railway disaster in German history occurred. A train carrying prisoners of war crashed into a US Army train, causing the train to derail, ignite the wagons, and cause numerous casualties on both trains.
On August 6, 1952, one of the deadliest catastrophes in the USSR occurred, as a result of which about 109 people died. The accident happened due to the fact that the train ran over a horse. According to official figures, a train weighing a thousand tons derailed because of the animal. In fact, the disaster occurred, among other things, due to the congestion of the train, as well as the imperfection of the then security measures.
Train derailment at Harrow & Wealdstone station
On October 8, 1952, there was a train derailment in the city of London. A train drove into a train that was on the platform. Then a locomotive rushing at a speed of 80 kilometers per hour flew into the resulting traffic jam. The tragedy resulted in 340 injured and 112 dead.
On June 6, 1981, one of the worst train accidents in history occurred. Due to an attempt to stop in front of an animal that ran onto the road, as well as due to heavy wind, 7 wagons carrying about a thousand people were overturned into the water. About 500 passengers died in the crash.
The biggest disaster in the history of Russia occurred on June 3, 1989. Due to an accident on the pipeline during the passage of two oncoming trains, the air-fuel mixture that had accumulated in the lowland ignited, resulting in a powerful explosion that scattered the trains like matchboxes. The tragedy resulted in a gigantic fire that killed 645 people and disabled hundreds. About 200 children died during the crash. The force of the explosion was comparable to the power of the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima. The column of flame was visible for a hundred kilometers.
On December 26, 2004, the largest and deadliest tragedy on the railway occurred. Due to the earthquake in the Indian Ocean and the resulting tsunami that hit the railroad that ran along the coast, the train was washed into the ocean. About 2000 people died.
