Awash, Ethiopia — 1985
On January 14, an express train of five cars was making its run between Addis Ababa and Djibouti with 1000 passengers. At the approach of the town of Awash, there is a curving bridge over the Awash River, which had to be taken at a reduced speed. However, the engineer failed to do so, and the train derailed on the bridge, with the four passenger cars plummeting 40 feet into the ravine.
Official estimates put the death toll at 428, and virtually all of the remaining passengers were badly injured. The engineer was arrested and charged with failing to reduce speed on approaching a curve.
Torre del Bierzo, Spain — 1944
On January 3, a mail train, the Galicia Express, with 12 cars and loaded with passengers became a runaway when it experienced brake failure. The train sped into a tunnel near the village of Torre del Bierzo, and just ahead of it was a shunting engine with 3 carriages trying to move out of the way. That train was still inside the tunnel when the mail train slammed into it.
As a result of the collision, signaling cables were cut and the engineer of the shunting engine could not contact a 27 car coal train that was heading in their direction on the same track. The coal train slammed into the shunting engine, causing a fire that burned for two days.
The death toll was estimated to be about 500, but there may have been many more. There were many passengers without tickets, and the fires completely destroyed almost all of the human remains. Survivors claimed the train was packed well beyond its seating capacity.
Balvano, Italy — 1944
With wartime shortages of all materials, black marketeers abounded, and they would stow away on freight trains to conduct their business around the country. Critically, there was a lack of high quality coal for fueling the trains. On March 2, Locomotive No. 8017 was burning a low quality substitute, one that produced odorless carbon monoxide. With several hundred stow-away passengers and crew, along with it’s freight, the train was grossly overloaded.
As it tried to handle a steep gradient, the locomotive stalled inside the Armi tunnel. The burning coal from the steam engines caused the tunnel to fill with the poisonous gas, which went unnoticed by the passengers.
A total of 520 people died in what was one of the strangest rail disasters in history. The only survivors were those who were in the last few cars that were not stuck inside the tunnel.
