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N0KFQ > TODAY 02.03.08 08:00l 42 Lines 1952 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Mar 2
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From: N0KFQ@N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
To : TODAY@ALLUS
March 2, 1944
Train passengers suffocate
On this day in 1944, a train stops in a tunnel near Salerno,
Italy, and more than 500 people on board suffocate and die.
Occurring in the midst of World War II, the details of this
incident were not revealed at the time and remain somewhat murky.
Train Number 8017 left Salerno heading for the rural area south
of the city through the Apennine Mountains. Although it was a
freight train that was not supposed to carry passengers, it was
common at the time for both soldiers and civilians to hitch rides
on any convenient train. Passing through the towns of Eboli,
Persano and Romagnano, the 8017 had picked up approximately 650
passengers by the time it reached Balvano.
Balvano was a tiny town between two long tunnels in the
Apennines. It was raining as the 8017 began to ascend the
Galleria delle Amri tunnel pass just outside of Balvano. Almost
immediately, it was forced to stop. There were conflicting
reports as to why this happened: either the train was unable to
pull the overloaded freight cars up the slope or the train
stopped to wait for a train descending in the opposite direction.
In any case, the train sat idling in the tunnel for more than 30
minutes. While this might not have posed a severe danger in some
circumstances, the train’s locomotives were burning low-grade
coal substitutes because high-grade coal was hard to obtain
during the war and the coal substitutes produced an excess of
odorless and toxic carbon monoxide.
Approximately 520 of the train’s passengers were asphyxiated by
the carbon monoxide as they sat in the train. The government, in
the midst of an intense war effort, kept a lid on the story--it
was barely reported at the time although it was one of the worst,
and most unusual, rail disasters of the century and came less
than two months after a train wreck in the Torro tunnel in Spain
killed 500 people.
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