Recent accidents on the railroad. The largest railway accidents in Russia and the USSR

There is less talk about train travel phobia than about aerophobia. Being in a familiar environment, and not in the air, creates the illusion of complete security. However, the large-scale accident of a passenger train in Spain, which killed more than 70 people and injured more than 150, reminded us how relative safety is in our technological age.

In less than 13 years of the 21st century, there have been several dozen major accidents on the world's railways.

Express hit by tsunami

On December 26, 2004, perhaps the largest train derailment in the history of rail transport occurred. There was no fault of people and technology in it - the riot of the elements became the reason.

The infamous December 2004 tsunami hit Sri Lanka. At that moment, when the destructive waves approached the coast of the Southern Province of Sri Lanka, a train packed with people was moving along the railway, passing close to the sea.

Ironically, the express had the beautiful name "Queen of the Sea". The composition was very popular with tourists, since most of its journey was moving a few tens of meters from the water. On the eve of the Christmas holidays, it turned out to be a huge number of local residents traveling home from business centers for the holidays, and travelers who decided to admire the views of Sri Lanka.

The exact number of passengers remains unknown - in addition to the 1,500 officially traveling on the train, there were several hundred free riders, which is a common thing for Asian countries.

The train, which stopped at the red signal of the semaphore, was hit by a tsunami near the village of Peraliya. The train with people was literally swept away by water. An 80-ton diesel locomotive was thrown 50 meters away, and 30-ton cars were scattered around the area. Two wagons were swept into the ocean.

The destruction in the region was such that the first rescuers were able to get to the train only on the third day. The exact number of victims is unlikely to ever be established - according to the most rough estimates, out of 1900 people who were on the train, no more than 150 survived.

This train is on fire

February 20, 2002 in Egypt, a passenger train followed the route Cairo - Luxor. This direction is always extremely busy, the cheapest third-class carriages are especially crowded. With a capacity of 150 people, they manage to pass more than 300 at the same time.

In the area of ​​​​the city of Al-Ayyat, one of the third-class carriages caught fire. For unknown reasons, the driver did not immediately notice the fire, and the flaming train drove about another ten kilometers.

At high speed, the flames rapidly gained strength. As a result, the flames engulfed the entire train, seven cars burned to the ground. Six of them just belonged to the third class.

People burned alive, jumped out of windows in fear at full speed and crashed to death. In total, more than 380 people became victims of the disaster, several hundred were burned and injured.

dangerous goods

On the night of February 17-18, 2004 in Iran, near the city of Nishapur at the Abu Muslim station, a train consisting of 51 cars suddenly rolled out of the parking lot and rushed down the slope. Unauthorized travel lasted about 20 kilometers, until around 4 am, near the village of Khayyam, the cars derailed and caught fire.

Rescuers and firefighters arrived at the scene of the emergency, and hundreds of curious people gathered around. The wagons were loaded with sulfur, gasoline, nitrate fertilizers and cotton. In most countries, such cargoes are classified as explosive, but in Iran, until February 2004, all of them were considered non-dangerous.

In addition to simple onlookers, journalists and even local politicians were at the crash site, who were trying to add to their popularity before the upcoming elections.

The firemen seemed to have the situation under control, but at about half past nine in the morning, the cargo suddenly detonated. Specialists subsequently estimated the yield of the explosion at 180 tons of TNT. The village of Khayyam was destroyed, and the explosion itself was heard even 70 kilometers from the epicenter.

It was officially announced the death of 295 people, including more than 180 firefighters, rescuers and officials. 460 people were injured. Foreign observers believe that the data on victims and wounded are significantly underestimated.

terrorist attack

The suicide bombings were carried out during the morning "rush hour" in order to achieve the maximum number of victims. Initially, the Spanish government suspected Basque separatists from the ETA movement of organizing the terrorist attack, but representatives of this movement categorically denied their involvement.

As it turned out later, the sabotage was carried out by radical Islamists close to Al-Qaeda.

The attacks were carefully thought out: they were carried out three days before the Spanish parliamentary elections and exactly 911 days after the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 ("9/11").

As a result of the explosions, 192 people from 17 countries of the world died, more than 2050 were injured.

A year later, on March 11, 2005, near the Madrid Atocha station, a memorial was opened in honor of the victims of the terrorist attack - the "Forest of the Dead". In memory of the dead, 22 olives and 170 cypresses were planted.

Over speed

Japanese railways are considered among the most reliable and safe in the world, but even here it is not without incident.

On April 25, 2005, a late high-speed train 5418M significantly exceeded the speed while passing a dangerous turn. Instead of the prescribed 70 kilometers per hour, the train entered the turn at a speed of 116 kilometers per hour.

As a result, the train derailed and literally flew into a multi-storey automatic parking building near Amagasaki Station. The first two carriages were literally flattened from the impact, and the rest also got hard.

There were about 700 people on the train, 107 of them died and 562 were injured.

Various versions were considered as the causes of the disaster, however, an analysis of all the data showed that the culprit of the tragedy was the 23-year-old machinist Ryujiro Takami. The young specialist had already been reprimanded for driving mistakes before, and already on this flight, shortly before the accident, he made a mistake with braking, driving at the station 40 meters further than expected. That is why the train was late.

Fearing another penalty, Takami became, as they say, "reckless" and ruined the train and people. Ryujiro Takami himself also died in the crash.

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 On June 3 at 23:14 Moscow time, a gas leak occurred as a result of an accident on the liquefied gas product pipeline, in the immediate vicinity of the Chelyabinsk-Ufa railway section. 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" were not supposed to meet on this section according to the railway schedule. 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 Zmeina Gorka, the ambulances almost missed each other, but there was a terrible explosion, followed by another. Flames filled everything around. The very air 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 the 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 had dropped an atomic bomb, - says the district police officer of the Iglinsky police department, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod Anatoly Bezrukov. - 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 heap 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 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. Charges were also brought against Deputy Minister of the Oil Industry Dongaryan, who, by 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.

Eat! - 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 in the face of 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.

Rail transport is one of the most inexpensive, convenient and safe. That is why it is often chosen by passengers. Nevertheless, accidents happen on the railways. When trains collide at full speed or go downhill, powerful destructive forces are at work.

The rumbling trains become uncontrollable, and a person can no longer stop the catastrophe. Inside the cars, a real hell unfolds, which makes a real mess of human bodies. People talk about plane crashes, forgetting about the biggest railroad accidents. But these catastrophes claimed the lives of hundreds of people.

Train fire in Egypt, 2002. This disaster happened to a passenger train, which on February 20, 2002 followed from Cairo to Luxor. A gas cylinder exploded in one of the carriages at 2 am - with its help, the passengers were heated. The driver did not notice that his train was on fire and continued to drive at full speed. In total, seven wagons burned out, and almost to the ground. Of these, six were in the cheap third class. Each of them was designed for 150 people, in fact, they were twice as many passengers. The catastrophe has acquired such proportions due to the overload of the train. The unfortunate had to jump out at full speed to jump out of burning cars, which also led to death and injury. According to official information, about 383 people burned down in the fire, and several hundred were seriously injured. However, it was not possible to find out the exact number of victims, since there was no complete list of passengers. The fire was so intense that many of the corpses turned to ashes, which made it impossible to identify them. Rumors speak of a thousand victims, which can no longer be proven. As a result of this incident, the Minister of Transport of Egypt was forced to resign.

Awash disaster, 1985 This railway accident is considered the largest in the history of Africa. It happened in Ethiopia on January 14, 1985 with a train following the Addis Ababa-Djibouti route. A train at high speed drove onto a curved bridge. The driver could not or forgot to slow down the train. As a result, four out of five express cars with a thousand passengers and seven passenger cars collapsed into a ravine. At least 428 people died, the number of injured exceeded five hundred. At the same time, almost all the victims were in serious condition. The nearest decent hospital was a hundred kilometers from the accident site. If earlier in Ethiopia, local separatists attacked trains, then in this case there was no talk of any sabotage from the very beginning. The driver was blamed, who was immediately sent to court.

Torre del Bierzo, 1944 On January 3, 1944, near the Spanish village of Torre del Bierzo, a mail train with failed brakes began to enter tunnel No. 20. There was a shunting train with three wagons, which did not have time to get off the track. Two carriages ended up inside the tunnel when they collided with a courier train. The fire immediately devoured the wooden structures and destroyed the first six carriages of the mail train. On the other side, a steam locomotive with 27 loaded wagons drove into the tunnel. The driver of the shunting train signaled as best he could, but he was ignored. The alarm system was damaged due to the fire. The disaster turned into a large fire that could not be extinguished for two whole days. This made it impossible to launch a rescue operation. It was not possible to calculate the exact number of victims - the Franco regime officially announced 78 dead. However, there were many stowaways on the train, and the fire destroyed the human remains. Today it is generally accepted that the number of victims was in the hundreds - the train was overcrowded, because many were going to the Christmas market. Already in the 40s they talked about 200-250 dead, but today it is believed that there could be 500-800 of them.

Balvano, 1944 During World War II, disruptions in the supply of goods led to the flourishing of the black market. By 1944, speculators and just small businessmen were hiding in freight trains to get to the farms of their suppliers. But in those years, there was a situation on the railway with a shortage of high-quality coal. As a result, lower-order substitutes went into the furnace, which produced a huge amount of carbon monoxide. He was extremely poisonous, but had no smell, which made him unnoticed. On March 2, 1944, a significantly overloaded train 8017 carrying cars got stuck inside a steep tunnel. Its crew, passengers and several hundred passengers, including those illegally nestled outside, were exposed to those same carbon monoxide gases. The only survivors were those who rode in the last wagons and did not have time to enter the tunnel. That accident claimed the lives of 426 people officially, but in reality there were one and a half times more victims.

Ufa, 1989. This railway disaster is considered the largest in the history of the USSR and Russia. It happened on June 4 at the Asha-Ulu-Telyak stretch. Nearby was the West-Siberia-Ural pipeline, through which a liquefied mixture of gas and gasoline was transferred. A narrow gap formed in it, through which the gas accumulated in the lowland. It was there that the Trans-Siberian Railway ran. Shortly before the disaster, the instruments showed a drop in pressure, but the duty officer decided not to look for a leak, but increased the gas supply even more. As a result, even more combustible hydrocarbons flowed through the crack, which could ignite from any spark. The machinists also knew about the strong gas contamination at the site, but the railway workers did not attach much importance to this. At 01:15 at night, two passenger trains met on the stage - traveling from Novosibirsk to Adler and back. It is possible that as a result of braking, a spark was formed, which caused a volumetric explosion. Its strength was such that in the city of Asha, at a distance of 10 kilometers, the blast wave knocked out windows. In total, there were 1284 passengers on the trains, including 383 children. The shock wave threw 11 wagons off the tracks, seven of them completely burned out. According to official figures, 575 people died (unofficially - 645), almost all the survivors became disabled and received severe burns. The rescue operation was difficult due to the inaccessibility of the area.

Crash in the state of Bihar, 1981. The disaster occurred between the cities of Mansi and Saharsa. June is the rainy season in India. The rising hurricane wind overturned seven wagons of the train, which was going across the bridge, into the river. According to another version, the flood simply washed away the train. It contained from eight hundred to three thousand people. They also talk about a cow that appeared out of place on the way. The driver braked sharply, and the cars began to slide along the wet rails, breaking off the bridge. Help was hours away, and most of the passengers drowned or were swept away by the raging river long before rescuers arrived. In the first five days, two hundred dead were found, and the fate of several hundred passengers remained unknown.

Guadalajara, 1915 That year the Mexican Revolution was in full swing. Despite the change of power that took place, President Carranza continued to wage an armed struggle against his opponents. On January 18, 1915, government forces captured the city of Guadalajara in the southwest of the country. The president ordered that the families of the soldiers be transported there by rail from the city of Colima on the Pacific coast. On January 22, 1915, a special train with 20 overloaded cars set off. People even sat on the rooftops and clung to the outside. Somewhere along the way, the engineer lost control of the train on a long and steep descent. Many people flew out of the cars on sharp turns. As a result, in a deep canyon, the train finally derailed. Of the 900 passengers, less than a third survived. It is known that many Mexicans even committed suicide after learning about the death of all their loved ones. There were those who wanted to take revenge on the traveling brigade, but that one also all died during the disaster.

Catastrophe near Churya, 1917. The passage between the Romanian Churea and Barlad is marked by a steep 15-kilometer slope, which in some places is up to 6.7%. On January 13, at 1 pm, a train with 26 wagons, driven by two locomotives, passed through here. He transported wounded Russian soldiers and refugees hiding from the advancing Germans. And in this case, the train was overcrowded - people rode on the roofs and even between the cars. Such an abundance of people led to the fact that they simply damaged the pipelines of the brake system. As a result, during the descent, the drivers found that they could not slow down. The braking power of two locomotives was not enough. The drivers noticed that they were rushing straight to another train standing at the platform. When trying to switch to another track at high speed, the train derailed. 24 wagons went downhill. A fire broke out in a pile of twisted metal, which claimed the lives of 600 to 1,000 passengers.

Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne, 1917 This accident on the railway was the largest in the history of France. On December 12, more than a thousand soldiers returned home for Christmas in echelon No. 612. The train was made up of different cars, mostly Italian. It turned out to be so long that two steam locomotives had to carry it. In addition, part of the path ran through a steep descent of 33%. But only one engine was found, the second was requisitioned for the transport of ammunition. And of all the cars, only three had air brakes, the rest were assigned special brakers. The driver agreed to lead such an overloaded train only under the threat of a tribunal. At first it was possible to control the speed, but on the descent the train accelerated to 135 kilometers per hour. In one of the sharp turns, the coupler broke, and the first car went off the rails. The rest began to crash into it and the wooden structures flared up. The fire intensified due to the fact that many soldiers were carrying ammunition and grenades. Despite the help that quickly arrived here, there was no one to save. In total, about 700 people died in that disaster, many of the bodies could not be identified at all. People were buried in a single mass grave. At first, the disaster was hushed up as a military secret, but four days later the press told the whole world about the hitherto unseen accident. Six railroad workers were brought to trial, but they were acquitted.

Wreck in Peralia, 2004 This disaster was the largest in the history of rail transport. It was not the human factor that was to blame, as in most other cases, but the natural element. The passenger train "Queen of the Sea" made regular trips to the southern part of the island. Obeying the signals of the semaphore, the train stopped in an open area 170 meters from the sea. More than 1,500 passengers traveled on the train. At that moment, a tsunami hit the island, up to 9 meters high. There was a panic, local residents began to flock to the train, seeing it as a refuge from the water. The second 7-meter wave broke the train. Due to the crush, passengers were unable to get out of the cars, which turned from a shelter into a death trap. 30-ton cars were thrown into the jungle for a hundred meters, even an 80-ton diesel locomotive was carried away by 50 meters. Those of the unfortunate passengers who were not crushed by the train simply drowned. Only 150 lucky ones survived. Due to the scale of the disaster caused by the tsunami, there was no question of quick assistance. And the main road to the accident site turned out to be a damaged railway track. The number of victims is believed to have been between 1,700 and 2,000. It turned out to be impossible to identify most of them, besides, two cars were completely blown into the ocean.

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 one, 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.

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 has never been such a 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 Siberia-Ural-Volga region hydrocarbon pipeline, 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.