There's nothing quite like watching the countryside chug past your window, but that doesn't come
without a few dangers.
From collapsed bridges to natural disasters and human error, here is what has caused the
deadliest train accidents in history.
On December 26, 2004, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake in the Indian Ocean triggered a massive tsunami
that would become the deadliest in history.
According to Britannica, it killed 225,000 people across 12 countries.
It also would be the cause of the deadliest railway incident in history when the tsunami
pounded the shores of Sri Lanka.
As described by a 2004 report in The Guardian, a train named Samudradevi — or, "Queen of
the Sea" — was overcrowded with passengers looking forward to a holiday weekend.
As it headed toward the southern city of Galle, the tsunami slammed into the side of the train
without warning, derailing it and immediately filling the passenger cars with water.
Those who remained in the cars had little chance of survival as water deeper than 20
feet engulfed the cars.
In an interview with Reuters, one survivor who climbed out of a window said that most
passengers decided to remain inside, since they weren't sure what was happening.
Others outside were crushed against the train itself or killed by debris.
With as many as 1,700 dead, it indisputably became the deadliest railway incident ever.
In 2008, five of the carriages were restored and put back into use.
In 2014, family members of the dead, as well as a few survivors, took the same train cars
on the same path by rail in a memorial for those lost that day.
On June 6, 1981, Britannica says that a nine-car passenger train headed from Mansi, India toward
the city of Saharsa derailed while passing over a bridge.
Seven of the carriages fell into the waters of the Baghmati River.
The derailment has been blamed on everything from the engineer applying the brakes too
fast when he spotted a cow on the tracks, to slippery conditions caused by monsoon rains,
to even potentially a cyclone.
According to History, the seven passenger cars sank immediately, and any rescue attempts
would be hours away.
The death toll remains unknown.
The United News of India initially reported 215 dead, and after a major operation in which
divers recovered bodies, the government issued a press statement that increased the official
death toll to 232, with 88 rescued alive.
That disputed claims made by a Navy admiral, who said there could be 500 unrecovered bodies.
According to The New York Times, many of the bodies were washed away in the monsoon floods.
The best estimate, according to India Today, is that between 800 and 2,000 people died
in the accident.
It was December 12, 1917, and the tides of World War I had shifted toward the Allied
powers.
With the Christmas holiday approaching, more than 1,000 French soldiers were given a break
from where they were stationed in Italy.
To return home to their families, they boarded a train that was to take them to Lyon, France.
The problem?
They would be traveling through the Alps, and the engineer warned officials that the
ratio of one locomotive for nineteen passenger cars would make it very difficult to brake
while going downhill.
According to the book "World Disasters: Tragedies in the Modern Age," the single locomotive
was pulling three times its approved weight, but the engineer was threatened with a court-martial
if he did not continue the journey.
Needless to say, he was correct.
Despite trying to keep the train at 6 miles per hour, the train sped up and lost control
at the bottom of the hill before derailing and catching fire.
According to Britannica, the cars were constructed mostly of wood and burned quickly.
At least 500 passengers died, with many other sources claiming that the death toll — which
included a number of bodies that could not be identified — was even higher.
The engineer was court-martialed anyway, but was found not guilty of negligence.
France was not the only country to experience a deadly train disaster during World War I.
In August 1916, Romania officially joined the war on the side of the Allies.
That December, the German military advanced on the Romanian city of Bucharest for occupation
after numerous air raids, sending the Romanian military and many civilians scrambling.
The train that was leaving for the city of Iasi was extremely overcrowded with people
attempting to escape the German onslaught.
According to historian Dorin Stanescu, the train had a seating capacity of 1,000, but
may have had as many as 5,000 people on board, including people on the passenger car roofs.
The vastly overloaded train couldn't slow down when it needed to apply its brakes.
While the engineers tried to maneuver a way to stop, the train eventually slammed into
a fuel tanker, which exploded.
Some estimates say as many as 1,000 people died, but despite the catastrophic death toll,
there has not been much research on the incident beyond the work of a few Romanian historians.
The year was 1915.
The Mexican Revolution had been waging for nearly five years as competing revolutionaries
battled to overthrow the country's dictatorship.
After revolutionary leader Venustiano Carranza captured the city of Guadalajara on the western
coast of Mexico, he ordered that the families of his soldiers be brought there by train.
Tragically, the train ended up being packed well beyond capacity with people, who even
rode on the tops of the cars.
According to a report by the San Jose Mercury-News in 1915, the engineer lost control while going
down a steep decline, and people began to fall off the top of the train.
Soon, the train catapulted off the tracks and into a deep canyon, where 600 of the 900
passengers were killed instantly and only six survived without any sort of injury.
On June 4, 1989, one of the deadliest railway accidents in the history of the Soviet Union
took place near the city of Ufa in the midst of the Ural Mountains.
As described by The Moscow Times, it involved two passenger trains full of civilians, including
many children who were on their way to and from summer camp.
Unbeknownst to the engineers of the two trains approaching the area from opposite directions,
a gas pipeline near the tracks had leaked, and a cloud of flammable gas was floating
along the railroad tracks.
When the two trains passed one another, their wheel sparks ignited the cloud, and a gigantic
explosion equivalent to about 10,000 tons of TNT blew into both trains.
According to the BBC, many of the passenger cars were completely destroyed.
A total of 575 people died and another 800 were severely injured.
A team of Soviet and American doctors worked together in Ufa to save the lives of those
who suffered intense thermal burns.
Despite how catastrophic the disaster was, this story is mostly forgotten today.
Why?
Largely because of another event that captured the news cycle.
The world's news coverage during the month of June 1989 was focused primarily on the
Tiananmen Square protests unfolding in China, which overshadowed the disaster.
This story is particularly haunting because of how the passengers died: asphyxiation.
It was March 1, 1944, and World War II was raging.
According to History, the exact details remain somewhat mysterious, but what is known is
that a freight train was carrying around 650 passengers when it stopped just inside a steep
and narrow tunnel pass.
Some believe that it simply couldn't carry the freight load, while others have speculated
that there was a train coming down the slope in the opposite direction.
Regardless of the reason, it was during these 30 minutes that tragedy struck.
As described by Time, when people came to the rescue, the engine was still running and
more than 530 of the passengers had suffocated.
Due to the war, the locomotives had been using poor-quality coal substitutes that poisoned
the passengers with deadly carbon monoxide that they could not smell.
At the time, this tragedy didn't receive any press attention, as there were fears of crushing
the morale of the Italian people.
It didn't become widely reported in Italy until 1951 when families began suing for damages.
According to The Guardian, one of the deadliest train crashes in European history took place
in 1944.
That's when hundreds of people were killed near the Spanish village of Torre del Bierzo
in a tragic, chaotic accident.
According to Reuters, the crash took place when three trains collided inside a tunnel.
While the government announced that fewer than 100 people had died, the actual death
toll was likely somewhere in the 500 range, with some estimates as high as 800.
Like many rail disasters, it was the result of a train going too fast down a steep incline.
A runaway mail train plowed into another train inside a tunnel, and before the wreckage could
be cleared, a coal freighter train slammed into it from the other side.
In the book "The Iron Road: The Illustrated History of Railway," author Christian Wolmar
describes how censorship by the regime of General Francisco Franco meant the crash was
not discussed in-depth in Spanish newspapers at the time — part of why it remains a mostly
forgotten story today.
While train safety has come a long way in recent decades, tragic accidents still occur.
As described by The Guardian, it was February of 2002 when an overcrowded train going from
Cairo to Luxor caught fire, and there was no way for passengers to alert the engineer.
As the fire ripped through the passenger cars, people had to make the choice to either burn
alive or jump from the train, which was moving as fast as 70 miles per hour.
Eventually, the engineer heard the screams and stopped the train — but not before 370
passengers had been fatally injured.
A survivor who spoke with The New York Times recounted the terror:
"A horrible fire burst open the door like the devil himself was coming through.
People were screaming…
There was flesh and blood everywhere and I said to myself, 'I'm dead.'"
The blaze spread quickly through seven passenger cars.
As it went, it burned people alive: the train was so overcrowded that people couldn't move
to get to the doors, and most died together in groups.
One survivor told The New York Times:
"I squeezed out a window and was hanging [on the] bars running across it.
I saw so many people dying before my eyes."
He recalled holding on to the side of the train for as long as he could, finally letting
go when he couldn't stand the heat.
He woke up the next day in a hospital bed with a broken shoulder — one of the lucky
ones who survived.
In 1985, the worst-ever railroad tragedy to happen on the entire continent of Africa took
place.
According to the United Press International, a passenger train crossed over a 40-foot-high
bridge and derailed.
This sent the passenger cars plummeting into the ravine — and the Awash River — below.
According to The New York Times, the five-car train was carrying about 1,000 people at the
time.
Initial reports had the death toll at 392 with an additional 370 injured, but an Associated
Press report would later increase the numbers to 418 and 559 respectively.
The New York Times reported at the time that the train had been traveling too fast and
that the engineer, who was later arrested, had failed to slow the train as it approached
a curve.
An investigation determined that the deadly accident had been preventable.
While none of the train disasters in the United States have reached the tragic levels of those
in some other nations, there have still been numerous railway accidents of note.
One of the deadliest was the Malbone Street wreck of New York City.
It was November 1, 1918, and the driver of the train, containing 650 passengers headed
out of Manhattan, was a 23-year-old novice operator.
As recounted by Smithsonian Magazine, he took a curve that was too sharp too fast and slammed
the sides of the train cars into the walls of a tunnel, shattering the passenger cars
so that wood, glass, and metal fragments flew at the riders like shrapnel from an explosion.
Some who survived were then electrocuted by the third rail while trying to escape the
carnage.
The train was supposed to have entered the tunnel at 6 miles per hour, but PBS documents
witnesses who clocked the speed of at least 30 mph.
Nearly 100 passengers died, although the young driver survived.
According to The New York Times, improved safety features such as timed signals and
automatic braking would soon be added to New York City's trains.
The name of Malbone Street was also changed and today stands as Empire Boulevard.
While technically not among the deadliest for humans, the uniqueness of this train wreck
makes it worth mentioning.
Since the 1880s, "Buffalo Bill" Cody had been entertaining audiences with his Wild West
show.
The tragedy came later in his career, in 1901.
By then, the show was massive, involving thousands of people and animals moving from place to
place by train.
According to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the show needed an astonishing 50 rail
cars by the mid-1890s.
During the morning of October 29, 1901, tragedy struck when a freight train engineer misunderstood
a telegraph message and didn't realize that Cody's trains were still on the track.
This led to a head-on collision with Cody's train, destroying both trains and killing
more than 100 of the show's horses, including Cody's personal "star" horse.
A New York Times report stated that only two horses survived and that Cody was heartbroken.
Ohio History Central says that the collision also paralyzed one of his stars — Annie
Oakley.
Oakley recovered and the show would go on, but the 1901 disaster wouldn't be its last
rail accident: A train wreck in 1911 injured several staff members, but it was not nearly
as severe.
If a railway system suffers a timing or miscommunication issue, the results can be deadly.
That's exactly what happened during the early morning hours of July 9, 1918, in Tennessee,
when two passenger trains ended up on the same tracks heading in the opposite direction.
According to The Tennessean, the head-on collision took place on what is known as Dutchman's
Curve in the city of Nashville.
More than 100 people were killed, including most of the train's crew as well as numerous
Black munitions plant workers who were in a segregated passenger car near the locomotive.
Thousands descended upon the catastrophic scene, either out of curiosity or desperately
looking for loved ones.
The original reporting blamed the collision on human error, and experts at the time believed
both trains to be traveling over 60 miles per hour.
One newspaper reported grimly:
"The dead lay here and there, grotesquely sprawling where they fell.
The dying moaned appeals for aid, or, speechless, rolled their heads from side to side and writhed
in agony.
Everywhere there was blood and suffering and chaos."
By the end of the day, the city hospital was overwhelmed, with every bed and cot filled.
Today, a plaque memorializes the dead, and according to Nashville's WKRN News, fragments
of the crash can still be found at the location, over a century later.
In 1910, an act of nature set the stage for one of the deadliest train accidents in United
States history: A massive blizzard hit, as a train was making a routine trip from Spokane
to Seattle, Washington.
According to The Seattle Times, snow-clearing crews just couldn't keep up.
Eventually, two trains — the Spokane Express passenger train and an express mail train
— had to stop.
The trains were essentially stuck on the tracks near a small village for nearly a week as
frightening weather conditions and small avalanches surrounded them.
Some passengers without children chose to make the dangerous escape by foot to the nearby
village, and all of them would ultimately survive.
As the weather warmed slightly, the snow turned to rain and thunderstorms, which triggered
the deadliest avalanche in U.S. history.
As described by History, the terrifying roar of the avalanche could be heard before it
swept both trains down into a 150-foot-deep gorge, covering them in as much as 70 feet
of snow.
Rescue crews had to make their way through the snow to get there, and they spent weeks
digging out survivors and bodies.
Bodies of the dead were wrapped in blankets and had to be taken out by sled, and the final
body wasn't even recovered until four months later.
All in all, 96 people perished.
In 1865 in Ashtabula, Ohio — a small village halfway between Cleveland, Ohio, and Erie,
Pennsylvania — a bridge was constructed over a gorge that contained the shallow Ashtabula
River.
As described in "The Ashtabula Disaster" by Stephen D. Peet, disagreements over the bridge
construction ended with an uncharacteristically long truss-style bridge that was built at
a dizzying height.
It would last barely over a decade.
On December 29, 1876, a train with an estimated 160 passengers was headed west with two engines
in order to push through the winter snow when it crossed the fateful bridge.
Without any warning, the bridge collapsed, plunging the train 70 feet below into the
gorge.
The train then caught fire, which, says Ohio History Central, killed many of those who
survived the initial impact.
All in all, as many as 97 people died, while dozens more were injured.
According to OhioHistory.org, the state legislature appointed a committee to investigate the cause
of the collapse.
In an 1879 book on railway accidents, the author concluded that the weakness of the
bridge was known but disregarded, and it was surprising that it stood as long as it did.
In 1883, the designer of the bridge, Amasa Stone, died by suicide.
The deadliest disaster for Amtrak took place on September 22, 1993.
As described by History, a Miami-bound train with more than 200 people aboard was passing
near Mobile, Alabama, when, unknown to the Amtrak engineers, a towboat had clipped the
railroad's bridge.
The collision bent the tracks out of alignment by 3 feet.
The train, traveling at 70 miles per hour, began crossing the bridge.
When it hit the bent tracks, it derailed and plummeted into the bayou below.
The tugboat was able to rescue seven people from the water, but ultimately, The New York
Times reported that 47 people would perish that night.
India is the world's most populous nation as well as one of the most train-reliant.
In 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly talked up the urgent need to update the national
railway system, built during the British colonial era.
With infrastructure dating back prior to the 1940s, the system is so stressed that accidents
are a regular occurrence.
On June 2, 2023, India experienced one of its most profoundly tragic train accidents
in history — a double derailment in the eastern state of Odisha.
According to initial media reports, somewhere between 10 and 12 coaches of one large passenger
train derailed, likely due to an electronic signal failure.
That sent wreckage onto an adjacent track.
Another passenger train came through on that track and collided with the debris, leading
to the derailment of as many as three of its cars.
Hundreds of people became trapped under mountains of broken glass and metal.
Locals from a nearby village rushed to help as authorities arrived.
A team of 1,200 volunteers, 115 ambulances, 45 mobile medical vehicles, and personnel
and resources from the Indian army and air force contributed to the efforts, with workers
primarily using cutting torches to pry open doors to extract survivors.
By 10 p.m., mere hours after the accidents, efforts shifted from rescue to recovery as
personnel sifted through the debris to find the bodies of the deceased.
Within four days, the death toll had reached 278 with an injured person count of around
1,100.