On the 3rd of March, 1944, a coal-powered freight train approached the entrance of the Armi tunnel,
near the town of Balvano in Italy. Officially, there were less than a dozen people on board,
all of them crew. By the time the train exited the tunnel, however,
the leading engines would have been responsible for more than 500
deaths – the worst disaster to ever take place on any railway in recorded history.
In 1944, Italy was a country in turmoil. They started the Second World War under
the leadership of Benito Mussolini allied with Nazi Germany, but after a disastrous
military campaign in North Africa, the country was being invaded by Allied troops. In 1943,
Italy signed an Armistice with the Allies… but was then bombed by Germany. German forces
rescued Mussolini and put him in charge of a puppet state in northern Italy (called
the Italian Social Republic), who fought the Kingdom of Italy, in the south, for control.
In short, in 1944, Italy was the setting for
a civil war taking place in the middle of a world war.
All over Europe resources were scarce, with supplies and materials being diverted for
the war effort… sometimes to the detriment of civilians. In Italy,
troops and military equipment were given priority over civilian travellers on public transit. This
left many civilians simply unable to get seats on passenger trains. With no other option, it became
common for people to climb aboard and stow away on freight trains to get where they needed to go.
Supplies were scarce - food that was grown on farms was usually sent to the front lines,
with only a small amount of it making its way to cities, like Naples,
for people to live off. To combat this, people in the cities would travel out to
the countryside with goods that they could acquire from allied troops, such as coffee or cigarettes,
and exchange these for dairy products and meat with which they could feed their families.
With so few train tickets available, hopping onto freight trains was the main way in which
city-dwellers travelled out to farms to make these essential trades. Some
routes that were commonly used for this even became known as “Black Market Express” routes.
All of this – both the trainhopping and the black market trading – was technically illegal,
but the authorities didn’t intervene. The practise was filling a huge gap in the market. Allowing
it to continue kept peace in the cities, and helped to keep ordinary citizens from starving.
One other resource that was in short supply was coal. Many trains in Italy at the time
ran on coal, with only a few lines that had been fully electrified. This meant that on
some routes electric engines would have to be replaced midway to their
destination by steam locomotives. Since coal supplies were scarce,
train drivers would burn any coal they could get – even poor quality coal,
which generated less power and produced large amounts of odourless, poisonous carbon monoxide.
In February 1944, a train travelling from a US military base passed through a tunnel on
the Baragiano-Tito route. While inside the tunnel, the train driver was overwhelmed by
the fumes given off by the coal, and fainted. He fell in between the engine and the tender,
and was killed as a result. The death was regarded as a tragic accident,
and no remedial action was taken to prevent a similar thing from happening again.
The Naples to Potenza line was one of those often referred to as a Black Market Express
route. It took people from Naples out into the countryside, through the Apennine Mountains.
The line out of Naples was electrified, but as trains approached the city of Battipaglia,
steam engines would be swapped in. The non-electrified part of the track carried on
up and through the mountain, with some incredibly steep sections that required considerable power.
On the 2nd of March, 1944, 45 goods wagons set off from Naples. This was train 8017. In addition to
the official cargo, there were nearly 500 extra passengers on board – many of them headed out to
rural farms to complete black market trades. At 7:00pm, the train reached Battipaglia,
where a steam engine was swapped into place at the head of the train. During this stop,
an unknown number of passengers also joined the train. By the time it left
there might have been as many as 700 unofficial passengers on board.
At around midnight, the train reached Balvano-Ricigliano station where it
stopped briefly for maintenance before it began the ascent to the Armi tunnel around 50 minutes
later. It was slow going. The train reached a top speed of around 15 kilometres per hour
(or 9.3 miles per hour) as it made its way through a thick fog to the tunnel’s entrance.
The usual practice was for the staff at Bella Muro station, on the other side of the tunnel,
to send a signal back to Balvano when the train had safely made
it all the way through the tunnel - but that night, no signal was sent.
It is not certain exactly why the train stopped in the middle of the winding Armi tunnel,
which stretches around 1.8 kilometres (or 1.1 miles) through the mountain. The most likely
scenario was that the excessive weight, coupled with the poor quality fuel, meant that the train
struggled to cope with the turns and the 1.3% incline. Further, the rails may have been wet,
causing the wheels to slide, despite the sandboxes that had been deployed to try and prevent this.
For whatever reasons, at around 2:00am,
the train came to a halt with all but the last couple of wagons inside the tunnel.
Not long before train 8017 had entered the tunnel, another train had passed through.
Because of this, the air inside the tunnel was already thick with smoke. Ventilation
in the tunnel was very poor, and as the drivers attempted to restart train 8017,
more and more carbon monoxide was released into the air.
There was no way for drivers at the front of the train to communicate with drivers at the rear,
so when the drivers at the front tried to reverse back out the tunnel,
going downhill, the drivers at the back assumed that the movement was the result
of the train slipping backwards, and quickly applied the brake.
At this time of night many of the unofficial passengers were asleep - but even those who
were awake were completely unaware of the danger they were in. The carbon monoxide was odourless
and colourless. By the time passengers began to realise that something was wrong,
many people had fainted. The drivers at the front of the train were the first to lose consciousness.
Several passengers were able to disembark from the train and attempt to escape by
running back along the rails… but most of them were overwhelmed by carbon
monoxide and collapsed at the trackside before they could make it to fresh air.
Eventually one of the brakemen at the rear of the train, a man named Michele Polo,
realised that there was a serious problem. He disembarked and ran on foot back to
Balvano-Ricigliano station to request help. It was around 5:10am when he arrived there – far
too late for the majority of the passengers on board train 8017. Many of them had already
passed away in their sleep, in most cases entirely unaware that anything was amiss.
A train was sent to remove the stricken 8017 from the tunnel,
but couldn’t get close enough to do so, as the tracks were littered with bodies.
It took nearly three hours to remove these, and then clear the train from the gas-filled tunnel.
The “official” casualty count was 517, but there are indicators that there may have been as many as
626 bodies. In the immediate aftermath, these were laid out at Balvano-Ricigliano station, before
being moved to Balvano cemetery, where they were hurriedly interred in mass graves. Only 235 of the
dead were ever positively identified, and only the crew of the train were afforded formal burials.
Strict censorship was in place due to the war, and so the disaster went unreported. The Allies
were worried it would impact civilian morale, while the Italian authorities were keen to
distance themselves from such a deadly tragedy. It wasn’t until 1951 that a Parliamentary Commission
investigated the accident, although by this time little in the way of evidence remained.
Nobody was ever prosecuted over the disaster, which remains one of the deadliest ever to take
place on any railway. The disaster was blamed on poor quality coal. In the midst of a devastating
war, no one person was responsible for the quality of coal. The intense censorship at
the time of the disaster, coupled with the fact that most of the victims were desperately poor,
meant that there was little public outcry. Those who had lost loved
ones had no choice but to stay focused on their own struggle to remain alive.
Officially, those who died were classed as casualties of the war. In a sense,
they were… although they died not as a result of bombing campaigns or fighting…
but instead as a result of the chaos and the disintegration of normal life that often comes
to pass when the citizens of a country at war are struggling simply to survive.