00:00The Bump. In the 22nd of September 1993, around 2.45 inches the morning,
00:06towboat pilot Willie Odom is pushing six loaded barges up the Mobile River near Mobile, Alabama,
00:13in fog so thick he can't see the bow. He's got no chart, no compass, and limited radar skill.
00:19And he doesn't know it yet, but he's turned off the main river into Big Bayou Connaught,
00:24a shallow side channel. He thinks he spots another tow moored ahead and steers toward it to tie up
00:30and wait out the fog. What he hits is the unlit Big Bayou Connaught Railroad Bridge. He feels one
00:37bump in the wheelhouse, backs off, loses two barges, and sends no mayday. The problem? The impact shoves
00:44a bridge girder about 38 inches out of line, but never snaps the welded rail, so the signal keeps
00:50showing green. Eight minutes later, Amtrak Sunset Limited, carrying about 220 passengers and crew,
00:57rolls onto that span at roughly 72 miles per hour, and the bridge collapses under it,
01:03dropping three locomotives and several cars into 25 feet of black water. The locomotive's fuel tanks
01:09rupture, dumping thousands of gallons of diesel and setting the water around the wreck on fire.
01:1447 people die, most of them drowning in the submerged cars, others trapped between rising water and
01:22burning fuel. It's the deadliest wreck in Amtrak's history. The pressure drop. Just after 1.15 a.m. on
01:30the 4th of June, 1989, in the Eglinski district of the Bashkir ASSR in the Soviet Union, two passenger
01:38trains carrying roughly 1,200 people are passing each other on the line between Ufa and
01:44Asha. Many on board are children, headed to or from Black Sea Holidays, packed into sleeper cars.
01:52A natural gas liquids pipeline runs near the tracks, and it had been leaking. Engineers noticed the
01:59pipeline pressure dropping and just pumped it back up without checking for a leak. So, the gas kept
02:05escaping, pooling in the low ground along the rails into a massive, flammable cloud, hanging there in
02:11the dark. When the two trains met, a spark from the wheels or the overhead wiring ignited it. The blast
02:19was estimated at up to 10,000 tons of TNT equivalent. Seven carriages were reduced to ashes. The official
02:27toll was 575 dead and over 800 injured, and 181 of the dead were children. Nine officials were eventually
02:37charged, including the chief of construction of the pipeline, the cow. It's the 6th of June, 1981, monsoon season
02:45in Bihar, northern India, and an overcrowded Indian Railway's passenger train is running from Mansi towards
02:52Saharsa, packed so full people are wedged into every compartment. Torrential rain has swollen the Bagmati River below.
02:59As the train crossed the bridge over that river, it derailed, and coach after coach toppled off into
03:05the flood. According to some reports, the driver braked hard to avoid a cow that had wandered onto the
03:11tracks on the wet bridge. Other accounts blame a cyclone, or washed-out track. Most who died drowned,
03:18trapped inside submerged coaches as the current swept bodies downstream, which is why so many were never
03:24found. The official toll came in at 235 dead, but with no passenger list and hundreds missing,
03:31estimates run as high as 800 or more. It's widely called India's deadliest rail disaster.
03:37One locomotive. Late on the 12th of December, 1917, a French troop train loaded with over 1,000 soldiers
03:44pulls out of Modane Station in the Alps, headed from the Italian front toward Lyon. These men had survived
03:50World War I combat, and they're going home for Christmas leave.
03:54Wartime shortages meant a single locomotive was hauling all 19 wooden cars.
04:00The engineer reportedly warned officials the train couldn't brake fully on the steep downhill grade ahead,
04:06and brakes only worked on a handful of the cars. But he was ordered to roll.
04:11Once the train cleared the tunnel and started down into the Morian Valley, it took off,
04:16becoming a runaway that some reconstructions put at more than 80 miles per hours.
04:22Near Saint-Michel-de-Maurien, at the bottom of the grade, it ran onto a bridge and derailed.
04:28The wooden coaches splintered and telescoped, then caught fire, fed by the candles inside and the
04:33grenades some soldiers carried. The blaze burned through the night, leaving bodies burned beyond
04:38recognition. Estimates run from more than 500 dead up to around 800, France's worst rail disaster.
04:46Weeping waters. At 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the 24th of December, 1953, the Wellington-Auckland
04:54Night Express, train 626, leaves Wellington with 285 people aboard. The night is clear and fine,
05:03there's been little rain, and nobody expects trouble at the Wangaihu River Bridge near Tangiwai,
05:09New Zealand. But at 8.2 p.m., the rim of the crater lake high on Mount Ruapehu gave way,
05:15releasing about 2 million cubic meters of water in a lahar, a volcanic mudflow forming a wave 20 feet
05:22high of mud, rock, and ice. It tore down the river and struck the Tangiwai Bridge minutes before the
05:28train, washing away Pier 4 and leaving the span standing but ready to fail. The express hit it at
05:36about 40 miles per hours. Driver Charles Parker spotted something wrong and slammed the brakes about 650 feet
05:43out, which saved the last three carriages, but the locomotive and five coaches plunged into the
05:49flooded river. 151 people died, most by drowning, and 20 bodies were swept toward the sea and never
05:58recovered. The closed valve. The 13th of January, 1917, near Ciurea Station outside Iyasi, Romania,
06:06in the middle of World War I. A passenger train running the Iyasi-Burlade corridor is jammed with
06:13soldiers, refugees, and civilians fleeing the front, roughly 1,000 people in around 26 carriages,
06:19riding on roofs, in doorways, hanging off the buffers. The line into Ciurea drops down a long
06:26grade of about 10 miles. On that descent, the train became a runaway. The crew couldn't slow.
06:31The most concrete account says a brake line valve between the third car and the rest had been closed,
06:37possibly knocked shut by a passenger clinging to the outside, which cut the air brakes to everything
06:42behind it. The train hit about 60 miles per hours. With another train sitting on the main track,
06:48the runaway got diverted onto the curved loop, derailed at speed, and slammed into railway equipment
06:54and fuel tanks. The wooden cars exploded into fire. Estimates run from 800 to 1,000 dead,
07:01Europe's deadliest rail disaster, and there was never any formal investigation. The safest place,
07:08the morning of the 26th of December, 2004, train number 50, the Matara Express, nicknamed the Queen of
07:16the Sea, leaves Colombo around 7.30, packed with about 1,500 ticketed passengers plus standing riders
07:24running south along the coastal line of Sri Lanka toward Gale. Out at sea, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake
07:32off Sumatra had already launched a tsunami, and Sri Lanka had no warning system at all. Around 9 a.m.
07:40near the village of Paralia, a first surge flooded the tracks and stopped the train. People assumed the
07:46heavy steel carriages were the safest shelter from the rising water. Hundreds of villagers,
07:51their own homes flooding, ran toward the train and climbed aboard. Then a wave around 30 feet high
07:57hit broadside. It engulfed the train, lifted the coaches off the rails, and hurled them into the
08:03trees and houses inland. Passengers were pressed so tight the doors wouldn't open, and most drowned
08:09inside. Only about 150 of those on board survived. Estimates run from 1,000 to 1,700,
08:16dead. The deadliest train wreck in recorded history. The T-cylinder. Around 2 inches the morning on the
08:2420th of February, 2002. Train number 832. An 11-carriage third-class service is running south from Cairo
08:33toward Upper Egypt, packed for the Eid al-Adha holiday with poor villagers heading home. Each carriage,
08:40built for about 150, is carrying roughly double that, people sitting on the floor.
08:46Egyptian rules already banned gas cylinders and cooking stoves on trains, but enforcement was
08:52non-existent, and passengers routinely brought little butane bottles to brew tea. A fire broke
08:58out in one of the rear cars, blamed first on a burst cooking cylinder, later on an electrical fault,
09:04and it raced through seven carriages. There was no communication line from the rear to the driver,
09:10so the train kept moving for about four kilometers while burning. That turned it into a moving furnace.
09:16People broke windows and jumped from the speeding train, some dying on the ballast,
09:21some drowning in the Ibrahemia Canal beside the track. At least 361 died. All 11 railway officials
09:28charged with negligence were acquitted. No crash. The night of March, 2nd into 3rd, 1944. Freight train
09:378017 is climbing the Apennines from Naples toward Potenza in wartime Italy. Officially, it's a goods
09:44train, but hundreds of poor civilians have stowed away in the boxcars to barter for food, earning it the
09:50nickname the Black Market Express. Just after 1 a.m., the train left Balvano Ricigliano station and pushed
09:58into the Army Tunnel, 1.8 kilometers of single track on an uphill grade. Two steam locomotives were
10:05burning low-grade wartime coal. The train was overloaded with all those riders, and on the wet
10:11rails, the wheels began to slip. Around 2 a.m., it stalled, its full length blocking the tunnel while
10:17the engines kept firing. There was no collision, no derailment, nothing torn. The exhaust just filled
10:24the sealed tunnel with carbon monoxide. Most of the passengers were asleep and never woke,
10:30dying of poisoning as the train sat perfectly intact on the rails. Over 500 people died,
10:36with some counts as high as 626, and only 235 were ever identified. No one was prosecuted.
10:45Thanks so much for rocking with the channel for real. Hit that subscribe and turn on the bell so
10:50you don't miss a single one. And got a topic you want me to dig into next? Drop it in
10:55the comments.
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