Train accidents always lead to horrific consequences. And, unfortunately, Russia, like other countries, has repeatedly learned the truth of this statement. Its history can recall more than a dozen disasters that occurred on the railway tracks.

Mountains of torn metal and thousands of shed tears are what remains after such tragedies. And also, the incomprehensible sadness of mothers and wives whose loved ones were taken away by an inexorable fate. Almost all railway accidents and disasters are filled with it. Therefore, let's remember the biggest tragedies that occurred on the territory of the USSR and Russia in order to honor the memory of those who died in them.

The danger hidden in progress

When the first trains appeared, no one thought about how scary they could be train accidents. And even after the first out-of-control diesel locomotive took the lives of 16 people in Philadelphia in 1815, the world said: “What can you do, sometimes this happens.”

Indeed, today it is difficult to overestimate the benefits that trains bring to our lives. After all, thanks to them, trips even to the most distant corners of Russia no longer seem as incredible and long as before. And yet we should never forget that progress brings not only good, but also destruction. And the stories described below are direct proof of this.

The first train accidents in the USSR

1930 was a real horror for railroad workers. The reason for this is two major accidents that happened there. Subsequently, many residents of the country began to be afraid to use the services of “steam cabs”, choosing more reliable means of transportation.

So, the first accident occurred on the night of September 7-8 in the Moscow region. Passenger train No. 34 arrived at Pererve station, near the village of Maryino. Driver Makarov, who was driving the locomotive, immediately warned the station management that his train was damaged, and he had already stopped several times to correct the problems.

Makarov suggested replacing his diesel locomotive with another one in order to avoid possible troubles. However, his request was not fulfilled. Instead, he was given an additional locomotive to help him along the way. Unfortunately, such a decision not only aggravated the existing problem, but also led to tragic consequences.

So, when trying to move, the reinforced diesel locomotive broke all connections between the cabin and the passenger train. As a result, the locomotive moved forward, but the cars remained standing still. And everything would have been fine if the dispatcher had not given an early order to another train to arrive at the platform.

And now another passenger train is rushing towards the platform at full steam. Only a few meters from the station, the driver notices passenger cars standing in his way. Even emergency braking did not help stop the train in time. Subsequently, the collision injured more than 40 people, and 13 died on the spot.

Collision between train and tram

In the same year, another tragedy occurred in St. Petersburg. On the railway passage, near the Moscow Gate, a freight train, backing up, hit a passing tram. The impact tore off the last carriage and fell straight onto the passenger side. Unfortunately, by the time firefighters arrived, most people had already died.

Like other train accidents, this one occurred due to an absurd coincidence of circumstances. After all, as the investigation showed, on that day the control center suddenly stopped working, the workers servicing the tracks did not have time to move the switches in time, and the tram driver noticed the impending threat too late.

And such an absurd coincidence of circumstances took away 28 human lives, and the 19 surviving passengers never used public transport again.

Major railway accidents of the post-war period

The end of the war brought peace. New cities and towns began to be built everywhere, and the first conquerors of Siberia set off on their entertaining journey through the snowy region. Millions of kilometers of tracks were laid throughout the country.

But the price for such a leap in progress was the large-scale train accidents that occurred in the post-war years. And the worst of them happened near the Drovnino station, which is located in the Moscow region.

On August 6, 1952, locomotive No. 438 was supposed to deliver its passengers to Moscow. However, at approximately 2 a.m., he collided with a horse that was crossing the railroad tracks. Despite the light weight of the animal, the locomotive derailed and pulled the entire train with it.

The carriages went downhill one by one, crushing each other with their weight. When rescuers arrived at the crash site, they saw mountains of crumpled metal that buried a third of the passengers. And those who survived spent a long time recovering from the injuries they received during the accident.

According to official data, the train accident in Drovnino resulted in 109 deaths and 211 injuries. For a long time it was considered the largest train wreck in the USSR, until it was overshadowed by even greater grief.

1989 train accident

As mentioned earlier, many tragedies are caused by an incredible combination of circumstances. If it weren’t for them, then perhaps the world would never have felt the pain that the train accident near Ufa (1989) brought with it.

It all started on June 4, 1989 with a gas leak 10 kilometers from the city of Auchan. It was caused by a small hole in the pipeline, which opened 40 minutes before the tragedy. Sadly, the gas company knew about it, since the instruments showed a pressure surge in the pipes in advance. However, instead of cutting off the supply of blue fuel, they only increased its pressure.

Because of this, explosive condensate began to accumulate near the railway tracks. And when two passenger trains passed here at 01:15 (local time), it detonated. The explosion was so strong that it scattered the carriages throughout the area as if they weighed nothing at all. But, even worse, the condensation-soaked ground began to glow like a torch.

The terrible consequences of the disaster near Ufa

Even residents of Auchan, located 11 kilometers from the scene of the event, were able to feel the destructive power of the explosion. A huge column of fire lit up the night sky, and many even thought that a rocket had fallen there. And even if it was just a ridiculous guess, the reality turned out to be no less terrifying.

When the first rescuers arrived at the crash site, they saw the ground on fire and the train cars burned to the ground. But the worst thing was to hear the voices of those who could not get out of the fiery trap. Their prayers and tears are still long years chased rescuers at night.

As a result, even the largest railway companies seemed insignificant compared to this tragedy. After all, about 600 people died from fire and burns, and the same number were seriously injured. To this day, this disaster resonates with pain in the hearts of people who lost their relatives and friends in it.

Accidents that occurred on the railway in the 90s

With the collapse Soviet Union the railways did not stop. In particular, in 1992, two major tragedies occurred that took many lives.

The first accident occurred in early March, on the Velikiye Luki - Rzhev section. Due to the extreme cold, the train warning system failed, and the two trains simply did not know they were approaching each other. As a result, the passenger diesel locomotive crashed into the tail of a freight train standing at a crossing. As a result, 43 people will never be able to see their family again, and more than 100 were left with serious injuries.

In the same month, Riga - Moscow, having ignored the prohibiting traffic light, collided with a freight train. The frontal impact claimed the lives of 43 people, including the drivers of both diesel locomotives.

Tragedies of the new millennium

As sad as it may be, progress cannot yet protect passengers from risk. Train accidents in Russia occur even today, despite global improvements in safety systems.

So, on July 15, 2014, another tragedy occurred in the Moscow metro. An electric train carrying passengers derailed at Victory Park - Slavyansky Boulevard. As a result, 24 people died and more than 200 were injured.

Rail transport is one of the most inexpensive, convenient and safe. That is why passengers often choose it. Nevertheless, disasters also occur on railways. When trains collide at full speed or derail, powerful destructive forces are at work.

The rumbling trains become uncontrollable, and man can no longer stop the catastrophe. Inside the carriages, a real hell is unfolding, which makes a real mess out of human bodies. People discuss plane crashes, forgetting about the biggest railroad accidents. But these disasters also claimed the lives of hundreds of people.

Train fire in Egypt, 2002. This disaster happened to a passenger train that was traveling from Cairo to Luxor on February 20, 2002. A gas cylinder exploded in one of the carriages at 2 am; passengers used it to warm themselves. The driver did not notice that his train was on fire and continued driving at full speed. A total of seven carriages burned out, almost to the ground. Of these, six were in the cheap third class. Each of them was designed for 150 people, but in fact they carried twice as many passengers. The disaster reached such proportions due to the train being overloaded. The unfortunate people had to jump out of the burning cars at full speed, which also led to death and injury. According to official information, about 383 people were burned in the fire, and several hundred were seriously injured. However, it was never possible to find out the exact number of victims, since there was no full list passengers. The fire was so intense that many of the corpses turned to ash, making it impossible to identify them. Rumors speak of a thousand victims, which can no longer be proven. As a result of this incident, Egypt's Minister of Transport was forced to resign.

Awash disaster, 1985. This train accident considered the largest in African history. It happened in Ethiopia on January 14, 1985 with a train traveling on the Addis Ababa-Djibouti route. The train drove onto a curved bridge at high speed. The driver was unable or forgot to slow down the train. As a result, four of the five express cars with a thousand passengers and seven cars collapsed into the ravine. At least 428 people were killed, and the number of wounded exceeded five hundred. Almost all of 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 initially. The driver was blamed and was immediately sent to trial.

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 number 20. There was a shunting train with three cars, which did not have time to leave the track. Two carriages ended up inside the tunnel when a collision occurred with a courier train. The fire immediately consumed the wooden structures and destroyed the first six carriages of the mail train. On the other side, a steam locomotive with 27 loaded cars entered 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 major 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 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.

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

Ufa, 1989. This train accident is considered the largest in the history of the USSR and Russia. It happened on June 4 on the Asha-Ulu-Telyak stretch. Nearby was the Western Siberia-Urals pipeline, through which a liquefied mixture of gas and gasoline was transmitted. A narrow gap formed in it, through which gas accumulated in the lowland. It was there that the Trans-Siberian Railway ran. Shortly before the disaster, 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 flammable hydrocarbons leaked through the crack, which could ignite from any spark. The drivers also knew about the heavy gas pollution in the area, but the railway workers did not attach much importance to this. At 01:15 at night, two passenger trains met on the stretch - traveling from Novosibirsk to Adler and back. It is quite 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, 10 kilometers away, the blast wave broke the windows. In total, there were 1,284 passengers on the trains, including 383 children. The shock wave threw 11 cars off the tracks, seven of them were completely burned. According to official data, 575 people died (unofficially - 645), almost all survivors became disabled and received severe burns. The rescue operation was difficult due to the inaccessibility of the area.

Bihar crash, 1981. The disaster occurred between the cities of Mansi and Saharsa. June marks the monsoon season in India. A hurricane wind rose and overturned seven carriages of a train that was crossing 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 inopportunely on the way. The driver braked sharply, and the cars began to slide along the wet rails, falling 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, President Carranza continued to wage 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 soldiers' families 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 roofs and clung outside. Somewhere along the way, the driver lost control of the train on a long, steep descent. Many people flew out of the carriages at 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 crew, but they also all died during the disaster.

Disaster near Churya, 1917. The route between the Romanian Ciurea and Barlad is marked by a steep 15-kilometer gradient, which in some places is up to 6.7%. On January 13, at one o'clock in the afternoon, a train with 26 cars, driven by two locomotives, passed here. It transported wounded Russian soldiers and refugees hiding from the advancing Germans. And in this case, the train was crowded - people were riding 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 discovered that they could not slow down. The braking power of the two locomotives was not enough. The drivers noticed that they were rushing straight towards another train standing at the platform. When trying to cross to another track at high speed, the train derailed. 24 cars went downhill. A fire broke out in a pile of twisted metal, killing between 600 and 1,000 passengers.

Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne, 1917. This railway accident was the largest in French history. On December 12, in train No. 612, more than a thousand soldiers were returning home for Christmas. The train was made up of different carriages, mostly Italian. It turned out to be so long that it had to be carried by two locomotives. In addition, part of the route ran through a steep descent of 33%. But only one locomotive was found; the second was requisitioned to transport ammunition. And of all the cars, only three had air brakes; the rest had special brakers. The driver agreed to drive 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 sharp turns the coupling broke and the first car derailed. The others began to crash into him and the wooden structures burst into flames. The fire intensified due to the fact that many soldiers were carrying ammunition and grenades with them. Despite the help that quickly arrived here, there was no one to save. In total, about 700 people died in that disaster; many 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 informed the whole world of an unprecedented accident. Six railway workers were brought to trial, but they were acquitted.

Peraliya crash, 2004. This disaster was the largest in history railway transport. The culprit was not the human factor, as in most other cases, but the natural elements. The Queen of the Sea passenger train made regular trips to the southern part of the island. Obeying semaphore signals, the train stopped in an open area 170 meters from the sea. More than one and a half thousand passengers were traveling on the train. At that moment, a tsunami up to 9 meters high hit the island. Panic arose; local residents began to flock to the train, seeing it as a refuge from the water. The second 7-meter wave tore apart the train. Due to the crush, passengers were unable to escape from the carriages, which turned from a refuge into a death trap. 30-ton carriages were thrown hundreds of meters into the jungle, even an 80-ton diesel locomotive was carried away 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 talk of quick help. And the main road to the accident site turned out to be a damaged railway track. The number of victims is believed to be between 1,700 and 2,000. It turned out to be impossible to identify most of them, and two cars were even carried away into the ocean.

Original taken from schnause at the age of 25. June 4, 1989. Disaster in Chelyabinsk.

June 4, 2014 marks 25 years since a railway transport disaster of a monstrous scale and casualties occurred. The disaster on the Asha - Ulu Telyak stretch is the largest disaster in the history of Russia and the USSR, which occurred on June 4, 1989, 11 km from the city of Asha. As two passenger trains passed, there was a powerful explosion of an unlimited cloud of fuel-air mixture formed as a result of an accident on the nearby Siberia-Ural-Volga region pipeline. 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.

Trains No. 211 Novosibirsk-Adler (20 cars) and No. 212 Adler-Novosibirsk (18 cars) carried 1,284 passengers, including 383 children and 86 people from train and locomotive crews.

The train from Novosibirsk that night was late due to technical reasons, and the oncoming train stopped at an intermediate station shortly before the tragedy for an urgent disembarkation - a woman went into labor right in the carriage.

Significant passengers traveling to Adler were already looking forward to a quiet holiday at sea. Those who, on the contrary, were already returning from vacation, were driving towards them. The explosion, which occurred 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 cars and two electric locomotives. 11 cars were thrown off the tracks by the shock wave, 7 of them were completely burned. The remaining 26 cars were burned on the outside and burned out inside. In a radius of three kilometers around the epicenter, centuries-old trees were felled.

350 meters of railway tracks and 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines were destroyed. The fire caused by the explosion engulfed an area of ​​about 250 hectares. Later, the investigation will find out that the root cause of the gas leak and explosion was poor-quality welding of the gas pipeline. The result is a violation of the tightness of the seams. Gas is heavier than air, and there is a large depression in this place. An explosive mixture formed and the trains entered a completely gas-contaminated area, where a small spark was enough for a powerful explosion.

During operation 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 railroad, and on June 7, Mom and I went on the “memory” train from the station. Ufa to op. 1710 km. By that time, the wounded and dead had already been taken out, the railway connection 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 was burned! Where once there was forest, grass, bushes, now everything was covered with ash. It's like napalm, which burned out everything, leaving nothing in return. Mangled carriages lay everywhere, and there were fragments of mattresses and sheets on the miraculously surviving trees. There were also fragments of human bodies scattered everywhere... and that’s the smell, it was hot outside and the smell of corpses was everywhere. And tears, grief, grief, grief...

The 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 trinitrotoluene. According to other estimates, the power of the volumetric explosion could reach up to 10 kilotons of TNT, which is comparable to the power of the nuclear explosion in Hiroshima (12.5 kilotons). The force of the explosion was such that the shock wave broke windows in the city of Asha, located more than 10 km from the scene of the incident. The column of flame was visible more than 100 km away. 350 meters of railway tracks and 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines were destroyed. The fire caused by the explosion engulfed an area of ​​about 250 hectares.

The official version claims that the gas leak from the product pipeline was possible due to damage caused to it by an excavator bucket during its construction in October 1985, four years before the disaster. The leak began 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 that grew in length appeared at the point of gas expansion. Liquid condensate soaked the soil at the depth of the trench, without coming out, and gradually went down the slope to the railway.

When the two trains met, probably as a result of braking, a spark occurred, which caused the gas to detonate. But most likely the cause of gas detonation was an accidental spark from under the pantograph of one of the locomotives.

22 years have already passed since this monstrous disaster occurred near Ulu-Telyak. More than 600 people died. How many people were left crippled? Many remained missing. The real culprits of this disaster were never found. The trial lasted more than 6 years, only the “switchmen” were punished. After all, this tragedy could have been avoided, if not for 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 must not forget about this tragedy, the pain that people experienced... Until now, every day we are notified of one or another sad incident. Where, by chance, more than 600 lives were interrupted. For their family and friends, this place is on the land of Bashkortostan - the 1710th kilometer along the railway...

In addition, I provide 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 a liquefied gas product pipeline, in the immediate vicinity of the Chelyabinsk-Ufa section of the railway. An explosion occurred during the passage of two oncoming passenger trains with destinations Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk great strength and fire. There are numerous victims.

At approximately 23:10 Moscow time, one of the drivers radioed: they had entered a zone of heavy gas pollution. After that, the connection was lost... As we now know, after that there was an explosion. Its strength was such that all the glass on the central estate of the Red Sunrise collective farm flew out. And this is several kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion. We also saw a heavy pair of wheels, which in an instant found itself in the forest at a distance of more than five hundred meters from the railway. The rails were twisted into unimaginable loops. What then can we say about people? A lot of people died. From some, only a pile of ashes remained. It’s hard to write about this, but the train heading to Adler included two carriages with children going to a pioneer camp. Most of them burned down.

Disaster on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Here's 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 cars 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 extinguished within a few hours. According to preliminary data, the explosion occurred due to a rupture in the Western Siberia - Ural pipeline near the Asha railway station. Raw materials for Kuibyshev chemical plants are distilled through it. Chelyabinsk. Bashkiria... Its length is 1860 kilometers. According to experts who are now working at the scene of the accident, there was a leak of liquefied propane-butane gas in this area. Here the product pipeline runs through mountainous terrain. Over a period of time, gas accumulated in two deep hollows and, for reasons still unknown, exploded. The front of the rising flame was approximately one and a half to two kilometers. It was possible to extinguish the fire directly on the product pipeline only after all the hydrocarbon that had accumulated 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 messages came from the population around 21:00 local time, and the tragedy, as is known, occurred later. However, instead of searching for and eliminating the leak, someone (while the investigation is ongoing) added pressure to the pipeline and the gas continued to spread through the hollows.

Explosion on a summer night.

As a result of the leak, gas gradually accumulated in the ravine and its concentration increased. Experts believe that the freight and passenger trains passing alternately with a powerful air flow paved a safe “corridor” for themselves, and the trouble was pushed aside. According to this version, it might have been pushed back this time, since the Novosibirsk - Adler and Adler - Novosibirsk trains, according to railway timetable should not have met in this area. But by a tragic accident, on the train heading to Adler, one of the women went into premature labor. Doctors among the passengers provided first aid to her. At the nearest station, the train was delayed for 15 minutes to hand over the mother and child to the called ambulance. And when the fatal meeting took place in a polluted area, the “corridor effect” did not work. A tiny spark from under the wheels, a smoldering cigarette thrown out the window, or a lit match was enough to ignite the explosive mixture.

On June 6 in Ufa, a meeting of the government commission was held, headed by Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR G.G. Vedernikov. The Minister of Health of the RSFSR A.I. Potapov reported to the commission on urgent measures to provide assistance to those injured as a result of the railway disaster. He reported that as of 7 a.m. on June 6, there were 503 wounded people in Ufa medical institutions, including 115 children, and 299 people were in serious condition. There are 149 victims in medical institutions in Chelyabinsk, including 40 children; 299 people are in serious condition. As was reported at the meeting, according to preliminary data, there were about 1,200 people on both trains at the time of the disaster. It is difficult to give a more precise figure yet, due to the fact that the number of children under five years of age traveling on trains is unknown, for whom, according to current regulations, train tickets were not purchased and possible passengers also did not purchase tickets.

Until the time of the disaster, trains No. 211 and No. 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 to disembark a woman who had gone into labor brought these two passenger trains to the fatal place at the same time.

This is what a cold news report sounds like.

The weather was calm. The gas flowing from above filled the entire lowland. The driver of a freight train, which had passed the 1710th kilometer shortly before the explosion, reported via communication that there was heavy gas pollution in this place. They promised to sort it out...

On the stretch Asha - Ulu-Telyak at Zmeinaya Gorka the ambulances almost missed each other, but there was a terrible explosion, followed by another. Everything around was filled with flames. The air itself became fire. By inertia, the trains rolled out of the intense burning zone. The tail cars of both trains were thrown off the track. The roof of the trailed “zero” car was torn off by the blast wave, and those who were lying on the upper shelves were thrown onto the embankment.

The clock found in the ashes showed 1.10 local time.

A giant flash was seen tens of kilometers away

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 did the spark occur? Why did the trains, which were the most crowded with people in the summer, end up in the inferno, and not, for example, freight trains? And why did the gas explode a kilometer away from the leak? The number of deaths is still not known for certain - in the carriages in Soviet times, when surnames were not put on tickets, there could have been a huge number of “hares” traveling to the blessed south and returning back.

Flames shot up into the sky, it became as bright as day, we thought, they dropped an atomic bomb,” says Anatoly Bezrukov, a local police officer at the Iglinsky Department of Internal Affairs and a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. “We rushed to the fire in cars and tractors. The equipment could not climb the steep slope. They began to climb the slope - there were pine trees all around like burnt matches. Below we saw torn metal, fallen poles, power transmission masts, pieces of bodies... One woman was hanging on a birch tree with her stomach ripped 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 o'clock in the morning, teenagers who were returning from a disco in the village of Kazayak arrived to help the villagers. The children themselves, amid the hissing metal, helped along with the adults.

They tried to carry the children out first,” says Ramil Khabibullin, a resident of the village of Kazayak. “The adults were simply dragged away from the fire. And they moan, cry, and ask to be covered with something. What will you cover it with? They took off their clothes.

The wounded, in a state of shock, crawled into the windfall and were searched for by moans and screams.

They took a man by the hands, by the legs, and his skin remained in his hands... said Ural driver 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 shouting: “I won’t go anymore, I’m bringing only corpses!” Along the way, children screamed and asked for something to drink, burnt skin stuck to the seats, and many did not survive the journey.

Cars couldn’t go up the mountain, we had to carry the wounded on ourselves,” says Marat Yusupov, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - They were carried on shirts, blankets, seat covers. I remember one guy from the village of Maisky, he, such a healthy man, carried about thirty people. Covered in blood, but did not stop.

Sergei 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 and went on a freight train after it. A few kilometers later I saw a huge flame. Having unhooked the oil tanks, he began to slowly drive up to the overturned cars. On the embankment, the overhead wires of the contact network, torn off by the blast wave, curled like snakes. Having taken the burned people into the cabin, Stolyarov moved to the siding and returned to the scene of the disaster with the platform already attached. He picked up children, women, men who had become helpless and loaded, loaded... He returned home - his shirt was like a stake from the clotted blood of someone else.

“All the village equipment arrived, 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 them...

Specialized help came much later - after one and a half to two hours.

At 1.45 a.m. the control panel received a call that a carriage was burning near Ulu-Telyak, says Mikhail Kalinin, senior doctor on the ambulance shift in the city of Ufa. — Ten minutes later they clarified that the entire train had burned out. All duty ambulances were removed from the line and equipped 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 into the ashes, the first thing we saw was a doll and a severed leg... - said the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev. “I can’t imagine how many painkilling injections I had to give.” When we set off with the wounded children, a woman ran up to me with a girl in her arms: “Doctor, take it. Both the baby’s mother and father died.” There were no seats in the car, so I sat the girl on my lap. She was wrapped up to her chin in a sheet, her head was all burned, her hair was curled into baked rings - like a lamb’s, and she smelled like a roasted lamb... I still can’t forget this little girl. On the way, she told me that her name was Zhanna and that she was three years old. My daughter was the same age then. Now Zhanna should be 21, quite a bride...

We found Zhanna, who was being taken out of the affected area by the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev. In the book of memory. Zhanna Floridovna Akhmadeeva, born in 1986, was not destined to become a bride. At the age of three she died at the Children's Republican Hospital in Ufa.

Trees fell as if in a vacuum

At the scene of the tragedy there was a strong smell of corpses. The carriages, for some reason rusty in color, lay a few meters from the tracks, bizarrely flattened and curved. It’s hard to even imagine what temperature could make iron wriggle like that. It’s amazing that in this fire, on the ground that had turned to coke, where electrical poles and sleepers were uprooted, people could still remain alive!

The military later determined: the power of the explosion was 20 megatons, which corresponds to half the atomic bomb that the Americans dropped on Hiroshima,” said Sergei Kosmakov, chairman of the “Red Sunrise” village council. “We ran to the scene of the explosion—the trees were falling as if in a vacuum—to the center of the explosion. The shock wave was so powerful that glass was broken in all houses within a 12-kilometer radius. We found pieces from the carriages at a distance of six kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion.

Patients were brought in on dump trucks, on trucks side by side: alive, unconscious, already dead... - recalls resuscitator Vladislav Zagrebenko. — They loaded in the dark. They were sorted according to the principle of military medicine. The seriously wounded - with one hundred percent burns - are placed on the grass. There is no time for pain relief, this is the law: if you help one, you will lose twenty. When we walked through the floors of the hospital, it felt like we were at war. In the wards, in the corridors, in the hall there were black people with severe burns. I have never seen anything like this, even though I worked in intensive care.

In Chelyabinsk, children from school No. 107 boarded the ill-fated train, heading to Moldova to work in a labor camp in the vineyards.

It is interesting that the head teacher of the school, Tatyana Viktorovna Filatova, even before departure, ran to the station manager to convince her that, due to safety regulations, the carriage with the children should be placed at the beginning of the train. I wasn’t convinced... Their “zero” carriage was attached to the very end.

In the morning we learned that only one platform remained from our trailer car,” says Irina Konstantinova, director of school No. 107 in Chelyabinsk. - Out of 54 people, 9 survived. Head teacher - Tatyana Viktorovna was lying on the bottom shelf with her 5-year-old son. So the two of them died. Neither our military instructor Yuri Gerasimovich Tulupov nor the children’s favorite teacher Irina Mikhailovna Strelnikova were found. One high school student was identified only by his watch, another by the net in which his parents put food for his journey.

My heart sank when the train arrived with the relatives of the victims,” said Anatoly Bezrukov. “They peered with hope into the carriages, crumpled like pieces of paper. Elderly women crawled with plastic bags in their hands, hoping to find at least something left of their relatives.

After the wounded were taken away, the burnt and mangled pieces of their bodies were collected - arms, legs, shoulders were collected throughout the forest, removed from the trees and placed on stretchers. By the 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 remove the remains of flesh fused into the iron from the cars with cutters. In a separate pile 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 singed.

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, and her shirt.

His daughter was not on the living lists, he would recall later. “We searched for her in hospitals for three days. No traces. And then my wife and I went through the refrigerators... There was one girl there. She is similar in age to our daughter. There was no head. Black as a frying pan. I thought I’d recognize her by her legs, she danced with me, she was a ballerina, but there were no legs either...

Two mothers claimed one child at once

And in Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Samara, places in hospitals were urgently released. To bring the wounded from the Asha and Iglino hospitals to Ufa, a helicopter school was used. The cars landed in the city center in Gafuri Park behind the circus - this place in Ufa is still called the “helipad” to this day. The cars took off every three minutes. By 11 am, all the victims were taken to city hospitals.

“The first patient was admitted to us at 6:58 a.m.,” said the head of the burn center in Ufa, Radik Medykhatovich Zinatullin. — From eight in the morning until lunch, there was a massive flow of victims. The burns were deep, almost all of them had burns of the upper respiratory tract. Half of the victims had more than 70% of their bodies burned. Our center had just opened; there were enough antibiotics, blood products, and fibrin film in stock, which is applied to the burned surface. By lunchtime, teams of doctors from Leningrad and Moscow arrived.

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 crib...

American doctors, as they learned, flew in from the States, made a round, and said: “No more than 40 percent will survive.” As in nuclear explosion when the main injury is a burn. We rescued half of those whom they considered doomed. I remember a paratrooper from Chebarkul - Edik Ashirov, a jeweler by profession. The Americans said that he should be switched to drugs and that’s it. Like, he’s still not a tenant. And we saved him! He was one of the last to be discharged, in September.

An unbearable situation reigned at the headquarters these days. Women clung to the slightest hope and did not leave the lists for a long time, fainting right there.

The father and young girl who arrived from Dnepropetrovsk on the second day after the tragedy, unlike other relatives, were glowing with happiness. They came to see their son and husband, a young family with two children.

“We don’t need lists,” they wave it off. - We know he survived. Pravda wrote on the first page that he saved children. We know what lies in Hospital No. 21.

Indeed, the young officer Andrei Dontsov, who was returning home, became famous when he pulled children out of burning carriages. But the publication stated 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.

Pick it up at the morgue,” says the telephone number of Hospital No. 21.

Nadya Shugaeva, milkmaid from Novosibirsk region suddenly starts laughing hysterically.

Found it, found it!

The attendants try to smile forcefully. I found my father and brother, sister and young nephew. Found it... on the lists of the dead.

The switchmen were responsible for the disaster.

When the wind was still carrying the ashes of those burned alive, powerful equipment was driven to the site of the disaster. 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 were responsible for the death of people, for terrible burns and injuries of more than a thousand people.

From the very beginning, the investigation turned on very important people: the leaders of the industry design institute, who approved the project with violations. Deputy Minister of the Oil Industry Dongaryan was also charged, who, by his order, in order to save money, canceled telemetry - instruments that monitor the operation of the entire pipeline. 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 Supreme Court Bashkortostan passed a sentence - all defendants received two years in a penal settlement. In the dock were the site manager, foreman, foremen, and builders. “Switchmen.”

Afghans worked in the morgue.

The internationalist soldiers took on the hardest work. 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 and human remains were stored in refrigerated vehicles. Considering that it was incredibly hot outside, the smell around the makeshift glaciers was unbearable, and flies flocked from all over the area. This work required stamina and physical strength from the volunteers; all arriving dead had to be placed on hastily put together shelves, tagged, and sorted. Many could not stand it, shuddering and vomiting.

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:

Is this not our Lenochka? - they said, crowding around a black piece of meat.

No, our Lenochka had folds on her arms...

How the parents managed to identify their own body remained a mystery to those around them.

In order not to traumatize relatives and protect them from visiting the morgue, terrible photo albums were brought to the headquarters, with photographs from different angles of fragments of unidentified bodies placed on the pages. This terrible collection of death had pages stamped “identified.” However, many still went to the refrigerators, hoping that the photographs lie. And the guys who had recently come from a real war were subjected to suffering that they had not seen while fighting the dushmans. Often the guys provided first aid to those who fainted and were on the verge of madness from grief, or with impassive faces they helped turn over the charred bodies of their relatives.

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 on their own

There were also funny cases.

In the morning, a man came to the village council from the Novosibirsk train, with a briefcase, in a suit, in a tie - not a single scratch, said district police officer Anatoly Bezrukov. “He doesn’t remember how he got out of the train that caught fire.” I lost my way in the forest at night, unconscious.

Those who were left behind from the train showed up at headquarters.

Looking for me? - asked the guy who looked into the mournful place at the railway station.

Why should we look for you? - they were surprised there, but looked at the lists by rote.

Eat! - the young man was delighted when he found his name in the column of missing persons.

Alexander Kuznetsov went on a spree a few hours before the tragedy. He went out to drink beer, but he doesn’t remember how the ill-fated train left. I spent a day at the stop, and only when I had sobered up did I learn about what had happened. I got to Ufa and reported that I was alive. At this time, the young man’s mother methodically walked around the morgues, dreaming of finding at least something from her son to bury. Mother and son went home together.

There was no chain of command at the explosion site

Soldiers working on the tracks were given 100 grams of alcohol. It’s hard to imagine how much metal and burnt human flesh they had to shovel. 11 cars were thrown off the track, 7 of them were completely burned. People worked fiercely, not paying attention to the heat, the stench and the almost physical horror of death hovering in this sticky syrup.

What the heck did you eat? - a young soldier with an autogenous gun shouts to an elderly man in uniform.

Colonel General Civil Defense carefully lifts his foot from the human jaw.

Sorry,” he mutters in confusion and disappears into the headquarters located in the nearest tent.

In this episode, all the contradictory emotions that those present experienced: anger at human weakness in the face of the elements, and embarrassment - 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, railway workers found huge sums of money and valuables. All of them were handed over to the state, including a savings book for 10 thousand rubles. And two days later it turned out that an Asha teenager had been arrested for looting. Three managed to escape. While others were saving the living, they tore gold jewelry from the dead along with their burnt fingers and ears. If the bastard had not been locked up under serious security in Iglino, indignant local residents would have torn him to shreds. The young cops shrugged:

If only they knew that they would have to defend the criminal...

Chelyabinsk has lost its hockey hope.

The 107th school in Chelyabinsk lost 45 people near Ufa, and the Traktor sports club lost its youth hockey team, two-time national champions.

Only goalkeeper Borya Tortunov was forced to stay at home: his grandmother broke her arm.

Of the ten hockey players who were champions of the Union among regional national teams, only one survived, Alexander Sychev, who later played for the Mechel club. The pride of the team - striker Artem Masalov, defenders Seryozha Generalgard, Andrei Kulazhenkin, and goalkeeper Oleg Devyatov were not found at all. The youngest of the hockey team, Andrei Shevchenko, lived the longest of the burned guys, five days. On June 15 he would have celebrated his sixteenth birthday.

“My husband and I managed to see him,” says Andrei’s mother Natalya Antonovna. — We found him according to the lists in the intensive care unit of the 21st hospital in Ufa. “He was lying like a mummy, covered in bandages, his face was gray-brown, his neck was all swollen. On the plane, when we were taking him to Moscow, he kept asking: “Where are the guys?” In the 13th hospital - a branch of the Institute named after. We wanted to christen Vishnevsky, but we didn’t have time. The 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 Traktor club, a year after the tragedy, organized a tournament dedicated to the memory of the deceased hockey players, which became traditional. The goalkeeper of the deceased Traktor-73 team, Boris Tortunov, who then stayed at home because of his grandmother, became a two-time champion of the country and the European Cup. On his initiative, pupils of the Traktor school raised money for prizes for the tournament participants, which are traditionally awarded to the mothers and fathers of the dead children.

The explosion destroyed 37 cars and two electric locomotives, of which 7 cars burned completely, 26 burned out from the inside, 11 cars were torn off and thrown off the tracks by the shock wave. According to official data, 258 corpses were found at the scene of the accident, 806 people received burns and injuries of varying severity, of which 317 died in hospitals. A total of 575 people died and 623 were injured.

26 years ago, on the night of June 3-4, 1989, in the bearish corner of the Urals on the border of the Chelyabinsk region and Bashkiria, a pipeline through which liquefied gas was pumped from Western Siberia to European part Soviet Union. At the same moment, 900 meters from the scene of the incident, two resort trains, crowded with vacationers, were passing in opposite directions along the Trans-Siberian Railway. It was the worst train disaster in Soviet history, killing at least 575 people, including 181 children. Onliner.by talks about the incredible chain of random coincidences that led to it, which had monstrous consequences in their scale.

Early summer of 1989. While the still united country is living out its last years, the friendship of peoples is bursting at the seams, the proletarians are actively disuniting, the only food in stores is canned “Bulls in tomato sauce”, but pluralism and glasnost are in their heyday: tens of millions of Soviet people cling to their television screens, watching with desperate interest the sessions of the First Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR. The crisis is, of course, a crisis, but the vacation is on schedule. Hundreds of seasonal resort trains are still rushing to the hot seas, where the population of the Union can still spend their full labor rubles on a well-deserved vacation.

All tickets for trains No. 211 Novosibirsk - Adler and No. 212 Adler - Novosibirsk have been sold. Twenty carriages of the first and eighteen carriages of the second were filled with families of Urals and Siberians who were just striving for the much-desired Black Sea coast of the Caucasus and had already rested there. They carried vacationers, rare business travelers, and young guys from the Chelyabinsk hockey team “Tractor-73”, two-time national champions, who decided instead of a vacation to work in the grape harvest in sunny Moldova. In total, on that terrible June night, there were (only according to official data) 1,370 people inside the two trains, including 383 children. The numbers are most likely inaccurate, since separate tickets were not sold for children under five years of age.

At 1:14 a.m. on June 4, 1989, almost all passengers on both trains were already asleep. Some were tired after a long journey, others were just getting ready for it. No one was prepared for what happened in the next moment. And you cannot prepare for this under any circumstances.

“I woke up from falling from the second shelf onto the floor (it was already two o’clock in the morning according to local time), and everything around was already on fire. It seemed to me that I saw some nightmare: the skin on my hand is burning and slipping, a child engulfed in fire is crawling under my feet, a soldier with empty eye sockets is walking towards me with outstretched hands, I am crawling past a woman who cannot extinguish her own hair, and in the compartment there are no longer shelves or doors, no windows..."- one of the miraculously surviving passengers later told reporters.

The explosion, the power of which, according to official estimates, was 300 tons of TNT, literally destroyed two trains, which at that very moment met at the 1710th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway on the Asha - Ulu-Telyak section, near the border of the Chelyabinsk region and Bashkiria. Eleven cars were thrown off the rails, seven of them were completely burned. The remaining cars burned out inside, they were broken in the shape of an arc, the rails were twisted into knots. And in parallel with this, tens and hundreds of unsuspecting people died a painful death.

The PK-1086 Western Siberia - Ural - Volga region pipeline was built in 1984 and was originally intended to transport oil. Already at the last moment, almost before the facility was put into operation, the Ministry of Oil Industry of the USSR, guided by a logic understandable only to it, decided to repurpose the oil pipeline into a product pipeline. In practice, this meant that instead of oil, a so-called “wide fraction of light hydrocarbons” was transported through a pipe with a diameter of 720 millimeters and a length of 1852 kilometers - a mixture of liquefied gases (propane and butane) and heavier hydrocarbons. Although the facility changed its specialization, it was built as ultra-reliable with the expectation of future high pressure inside. However, already at the design stage, the first mistake was made in a chain of those that five years later led to the largest tragedy on the railways of the Soviet Union.

At 1,852 kilometers long, a full 273 kilometers of the pipeline passed in close proximity to the railways. In addition, in a number of cases the object came dangerously close to populated areas, including fairly large cities. For example, in the section from kilometer 1428 to kilometer 1431, PK-1086 passed less than a kilometer from the Bashkir village of Sredny Kazayak. A gross violation of safety standards was discovered after the launch of the product pipeline. Construction of a special bypass around the village began only the following year, 1985.

In October 1985, during excavation work to open PK-1086 at the 1431st kilometer of its length, powerful excavators working on the ultra-protected pipe caused it significant mechanical damage, for which the product pipeline was not designed at all. Moreover, after the construction of the bypass was completed, the insulation of the section that was opened and left open, in violation of building codes, was not checked.

Four years after those events, a narrow gap 1.7 meters long appeared in the damaged section of the product pipeline. The propane-butane mixture began to flow through it into environment, evaporate, mix with the air and, being heavier than it, accumulate in the lowland through which the Trans-Siberian Railway passed 900 meters to the south. Very close to the strategic railway line, along which passenger and freight trains passed every few minutes, a real invisible “gas lake” formed.

The drivers drew the attention of the site dispatchers to the strong smell of gas in the area of ​​the 1710th kilometer of the road, as well as a drop in pressure in the pipeline. Instead of taking emergency measures to stop traffic and eliminate the leak, both duty services chose not to pay attention to what was happening. Moreover, the organization operating PK-1086 even increased the gas supply to it to compensate for the pressure drop. As propane and butane continued to accumulate, disaster became inevitable.

The Novosibirsk - Adler and Adler - Novosibirsk trains could not possibly meet at this fateful point. Under no circumstances if they followed the schedule. But train 212 was late due to technical reasons, and train 211 was forced to make an emergency stop at one of the intermediate stations to disembark a passenger who had gone into labor, which also resulted in a shift in the schedule. An absolutely incredible coincidence, unthinkable even in the most cruel nightmares, coupled with a blatant violation of technological discipline, nevertheless occurred.

Two late trains met at the damned 1710th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway at 1:14 am. An accidental spark from the pantograph of one of the electric locomotives, or a spark from the train braking after a long descent into a lowland, or even a cigarette butt thrown out of the window was enough to ignite the “gas lake”. At the moment the trains met, a massive explosion of the accumulated propane-butane mixture occurred, and the Ural forest turned into hell.

A policeman from Asha, a city 11 kilometers from the crash site, later told reporters: “I was awakened by a flash of terrible brightness. There was a glow on the horizon. A couple of tens of seconds later, a blast wave reached Asha, breaking a lot of glass. I realized that something terrible had happened. A few minutes later I was already at the city police department, together with the guys I rushed to the “duty room” and rushed towards the glow. What we saw is impossible to imagine even with a sick imagination! The trees burned like giant candles, and the cherry-red carriages smoked along the embankment. There was an absolutely impossible single cry of pain and horror from hundreds of dying and burned people. The forest was burning, the sleepers were burning, people were burning. We rushed to catch the rushing “living torches,” knock the fire off them, and bring them closer to the road away from the fire. Apocalypse…".

More than 250 people instantly burned in this gigantic fire. No one can say the exact numbers, because the temperature at the epicenter of the disaster exceeded 1000 degrees - there was literally nothing left of some passengers. Another 317 people died later in hospitals from terrible burns. The worst thing is that almost a third of all victims were children.

People died in families, children - in entire classes, along with the teachers who accompanied them on vacation. Parents often didn’t even have anything left to bury. 623 people received injuries of varying severity, many of them remained disabled for life.

Despite the fact that the scene of the tragedy was in a relatively inaccessible area, the evacuation of the victims was organized quite quickly. Dozens of helicopters were working, the victims of the disaster were taken out by trucks, even by an uncoupled electric locomotive of a freight train that stood at a nearby station and allowed those same Adler passenger trains to pass. The number of victims could have been even greater if it had not been for a modern burn center, which opened in Ufa shortly before the incident. Doctors, police, railway workers, and finally ordinary people, volunteers from neighboring settlements worked around the clock.

Rail transport ranks third after road and air transport in terms of traffic safety.

Causes of railway accidents

The most common causes of accidents in railway transport:
- natural physical wear and tear of technical equipment;
- violation of operating rules;
- increasing complexity of technologies;
- increase in the number, power and speed of vehicles;
- increase in population density near railway facilities, non-compliance by the population with safety rules.

The leading position, about 25%, among the main causes of accidents in railway transport, is occupied by derailments.
About 25% of derailments and accidents on the railroad are caused by train collisions with automobile and horse-drawn vehicles, handcars, and cyclists. Most often this happens at railway crossings.

Violations in the railway traffic control system lead to the train leaving the busy track and causing a collision. The reason for this may be a violation of the order of maneuvering work on station tracks.
Many emergency situations in railway transport are caused by explosions and fires.

Chronology of disasters

On June 12, 1965, a very large crash occurred on the Novinka-Chascha section near Leningrad. The station manager mistakenly released the trains towards each other; the drivers saw each other only 11 seconds before the collision.

On February 1, 1988, a crash occurred on the Volga - Filino section near Yaroslavl freight train, which transported potent toxic substances (SDYAV). 7 cars derailed, including 3 tanks with heptyl (SDYAV of the first toxicity class). The cause of the crash was the unblocking of the arrow due to a destroyed buffer falling on it. As a result, a center of chemical contamination with an area of ​​over 5 thousand square meters was formed. 3 thousand people were under threat of defeat. Restoration work took almost 18 days.

On June 4, 1988, at 9:32 a.m., three carriages of a freight train traveling from Dzerzhinsk to Kazakhstan, with 118 tons of industrial goods, exploded at the Arzamas-1 station of the Gorky Railway. explosives, intended for mining enterprises. 91 people were killed, including 17 children, 840 were injured. 250 meters of the railway track, the railway station and station buildings, and nearby residential buildings were destroyed. The government commission did not establish the cause of the explosion.

In the same year, a passenger train crashed at Bologoye station. 31 people were killed and 182 were injured. On August 16, 1988, high-speed passenger train No. 159 "Aurora" on the Leningrad-Moscow route crashed on the Berezayka - Poplavenets section. In the crash, all 15 cars of the train were derailed. A fire broke out in the overturned restaurant carriage and spread to other carriages.

On October 4, 1988, at 4.30 am, an explosion occurred on the Sverdlovsk - Sortirovochny section. Two trains with coal and explosives took off into the air. According to official data alone, six people died: four at the scene of the accident, two already in the hospital. Thousands were seriously injured; the most common are shrapnel wounds to the eyes and face. Hundreds of families lost a roof over their heads.

On June 3, 1989, the largest railway accident occurred: when two oncoming trains passed on the Ulu-Telyak - Kazayak section (Bashkortostan). The reason is an explosion of a hydrocarbon-air mixture accumulated near and on the railway track. The energy of the explosion was equivalent to the explosion of 250-300 tons of TNT. At its epicenter were two passenger trains: Novosibirsk - Adler and Adler - Novosibirsk. 11 cars were thrown off the tracks, 7 of them burned completely, 26 cars burned out both inside and out. According to various sources, 575 or 645 people died.

In November 1989, at the Rudny station of the Murmansk branch of the Oktyabrskaya Railway, due to the negligence of the dispatcher, a collision occurred between two freight locomotives. One locomotive crew was killed, and members of another received various injuries.

In March 1992, at the Podsosenka crossing of the Velikiye Luki - Rzhev section of the Oktyabrskaya Railway, a passenger train collided with an oncoming freight train. As a result, 43 people were killed and 108 were injured.

On March 1, 1993, in the Moscow region, a tank containing styrene, a toxic substance whose vapors strongly irritate the mucous membranes, overturned during a freight train crash. There is a styrene leak. 39 people were injured, of whom 11 died.

On March 3, 1992, on the Oktyabrskaya Railway, fast passenger train No. 4 Riga-Moscow at the exit switches of the Podsosenki siding collided with a freight train from the opposite direction. 41 people were killed, 16 were seriously injured. Both locomotive crews were fatally injured. The crash occurred due to the passage of a prohibiting signal by the locomotive crew of the Riga-Moscow passenger train.

On November 19, 1993, in the Arkhangelsk region, on the Kizema-Loiga stretch, a handcar collided with the tail car of a freight train. Of the 25 people in the trolley, 24 were injured and one died.

On April 28, 1994, a train accident occurred 180 kilometers southeast of Ufa (Bashkiria): two freight trains collided on a narrow-gauge railway. The collision killed two people. The reason was a violation by the station manager of the rules for operating railway transport, which allowed the train to run through a red traffic light.

On August 11, 1994, 115 kilometers from Belgorod, on the Topoli - Urazovo section of the Southern Railway, a train accident occurred. Several tail cars broke away from a freight train coming from Ukraine and overturned onto a parallel track; an oncoming electric train crashed into them. 20 people were killed, 52 were injured.

On February 9, 1995, the Moscow-Kyiv passenger train made a forced stop on the Sukhinichi-Zhivodovka section of the Moscow Railway due to a malfunction of the electric locomotive. The train rolled down and collided with the locomotive of the Moscow-Khmelnitsky train. As a result of the impact, four passengers of the last carriage died at the scene of the accident, and 11 passengers were injured of varying degrees of severity.

On July 20, 1995, two oncoming trains collided on the Gorky Railway near Sergach, Nizhny Novgorod Region: a postal freight train and a freight train. Three liquefied gas tanks exploded. Six people were killed and 20 were injured.

August 8, 1995 at Krasnodar region On the Tikhoretsk - Kavkazskaya section of the North Caucasus Railway, a freight train, not reaching two kilometers from the Kavkazskaya station, crashed. 16 cars derailed and overturned, four tanks with hydrogen peroxide and two with gasoline caught fire. Two and a half kilometers of the railway track were disabled.

On February 11, 1996, in Volokolamsk, near Moscow, at a railway crossing near the Bukholovo station, an electric train collided with a bus that was transporting a group of schoolchildren. Two children died, five schoolchildren and the bus driver were taken to intensive care.

On May 31, 1996, on the Litvinovo-Talmenka section of the Kemerovo Railway, four cement cars unhooked from a freight train and rolled into the station area, where a crowded train crashed into them. 100 people were injured, 17 died.

On July 8, 1998, a major disaster occurred in the Moscow region. In the area of ​​the Bekasovo-1 station, a gravel cleaning machine missed the prohibitory semaphore signal. Having failed to let the train pass, it crashed into the train. The car was thrown onto the opposite line, under the wheels of an oncoming train. 3 people died. If the accident had not occurred at 7 a.m., there would have been many more casualties.

On April 4, 1999, near the Voevodskoye station (Mordovia), on the 642nd kilometer of the Kuibyshev railway, the Syzran-Ruzaevka freight train derailed. The accident occurred due to wear and tear on the railway track. 12 wagons loaded with VAZ cars went downhill, two platforms and a heated wagon overturned. About 250 meters of the canvas and 150 meters of the contact line were damaged.

On January 26, 2000, a collision occurred between passenger and freight trains on the Torbino - Mstinsky Bridge section of the Oktyabrskaya Railway. As a result of the accident, the assistant driver was killed and three people were injured.

December 9, 2001 at the Gonzha station of the Transbaikal Railway in Amur region freight trains collided. The impact derailed the four tail cars of the first train. As a result of the disaster, two people died.

On September 25, 2001, on the Mechetenskaya - Ataman stretch, 130 kilometers southeast of Rostov-on-Don, six cars and the locomotive of passenger train No. 191 Rostov-Baku derailed. The cause of the accident was the absence of 25 meters of track rails, removed by unknown attackers.

On April 1, 2002, near the Yaroslavsky railway station in Moscow, a collision occurred between a Moscow-Khabarovsk passenger train and a shunting diesel locomotive. Upon impact, the diesel locomotive's wheelset was torn off. 22 people sought medical help.

On November 11, 2002, at the Baltiysky station in St. Petersburg, an electric train left the depot after repairs for a run-in. Due to a malfunction of the brake system, two carriages of the train left the tracks under the tented part of the station, where passengers were located. Four people were killed and nine were injured.

December 5, 2003 on a passenger train Kislovodsk - Mineral water, which was located near the central station of the city of Essentuki (Stavropol Territory), an explosive device filled with metal objects with a power equal to 30 kilograms of TNT went off. 47 people died, more than 180 people received injuries of varying severity.

On December 18, 2003, at the 86th kilometer of the Ishcherskaya - Stoderevskaya railway section of the North Caucasus Railway (Naursky district of Chechnya), an explosive device went off under the locomotive of freight train No. 2503. There were no casualties.

On December 24, 2003, on the Tulun-Utai railway section (Irkutsk region), the Vladivostok-Novosibirsk train collided with a KamAZ truck that was at the crossing. Three people died.

On June 12, 2005, at the 153rd kilometer of the railway on the Uzunovo - Bogatishchevo section, the Grozny - Moscow train was blown up. Four carriages derailed. 42 people sought medical help, five of whom were hospitalized. According to the FSB, a shellless explosive device with a capacity of three kilograms of TNT went off.

On June 15, 2005, on the Zubtsovo - Arestovo section, a train with fuel oil derailed, 10 tanks overturned and depressurized, up to 300 tons of fuel oil spilled onto the ground, of which about 2 tons fell into the Gostyushka River - a tributary of the Vazuza River, which flows into the Volga River .

On July 11, 2007, in the Amur Region, on the stretch between the Urusha and Sgibeevo stations of the Mogochinsky branch of the Trans-Baikal Railway, while a freight train was moving, 12 tail cars came off the train and overturned. 300 meters of the railway track were destroyed and a power line support was damaged. There were no casualties.

On August 13, 2007, on the Burga - Malaya Vishera section of the Oktyabrskaya Railway, while high-speed train No. 166 "Nevsky Express" was passing, an accident occurred. Its cause was the undermining of the railway track by a homemade explosive device with a capacity of 8-9 kilograms of TNT. As a result of the explosion, the electric locomotive and all 12 cars derailed. 60 people were injured.

November 27, 2009 at about 10 pm near settlement Erzovka, on the 285th kilometer of the Oktyabrskaya Railway section, an explosion occurred under the locomotive of the Nevsky Express train. There were 661 passengers on the train at the time of the crash. The first cars, by inertia, passed through the explosion at high speed, the last three were practically crushed by the blast wave. There were about 200 people in these carriages at that moment. The wounded and survivors were evacuated by air by helicopters of the Ministry of Emergency Situations to hospitals in nearby settlements.

As of November 29, 25 people are known to have died, and another 26 are listed as missing. The list of victims admitted to hospitals in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novgorod and Tver regions contains 104 names.