RAILWAY DISASTER

Taranaki Daily News, 18 July 1933, Page 13

RAILWAY DISASTER

FOURTEEN PERSONS KILLED ABOUT 136 PEOPLE INJURED. HOLIDAY TRAIN WRECKED. Fourteen French holiday-makers were killed and about 136 injured in a disaster at Nantes on Sunday, June 4, to an express from Paris to La Baule, a seaside report. While most of the passengers were asleep, the crowded train left the ’ metals at 5 a.m. and was wrecked. It is believed that the accident was due to the engine-driver failing to act on specific orders to reduce speed over a certain section to 18 miles an hour. The train was travelling at 60 miles an hour. Almost simultaneously with the more serious disaster, the Nantes-Lyons express collided with a passenger train outside Tours, about 26 people being slightly injured. Of the 14 dead, six were women and one a baby of 17 months, whose mother was also killed. No Englishmen were mentioned among the victims. But several must have had narrow escapes, as the wrecked train was one of two special services put on to cope with the Whitsun rush, which was particularly heavy owing to the fine weather. It is probable that there were a number of English visitors in the regular train Of the seven coaches that left the rails, five were a complete mass of wreckage, and the other two were just recognisable. One seriously injured woman was rescued about 9 o’clock in tragic circumstances. She was found by one of the doctors pinned under the wreckage in great pain, but still conscious, and terribly anxious about her mother and sister, who, she said, had been sitting next to her. The doctor noticed that close beneath the injured passenger’s very feet there lay the terribly mutilated bodies of two dead women.

They were beyond his help. So, without a word to the anxious survivor, he took her injured head in his lap and held it gently there for three hours until she could be extricated, all the while carefully concealing from her sight the tragic remains of her relatives. One of the most pathetic scenes of the accident, another eye-witness said, was a little baby which by a miracle was unhurt, crying for its mother, who had been killed.

Two third-class carriages were transformed into a mass of twisted iron, broken wood and glass at least 20ft. high. The locomotive and luggage van were overturned and part of another carriage had fallen down a 20ft. bank and was lying in a swamp below. . The scene of the disaster was particularly sinister, as it is just by a “cemetery” for old railway coaches and locomotives. Besides, just a few yards along the permanent way there is the wreckage of a goods train which was derailed only three days previously. “Owing to the first accident,” an official on the scene of the disaster said, .“the permanent way was under repair and the trains were passing along a loop rail. All the engine-drivers had Been given instructions not to exceed 20 miles an hour at this spot. But the driver of the wrecked train was going at almost 60 miles an hour! Not only had he received a written warning at Tours an hour or two before the accident, but he went by four special danger signals just before crashing.”

By an extraordinary chance the driver and the stoker escaped without a scratch. The driver was arrested and charged with “homicide by imprudence.” M. Halgand, the vice-stationmaster of Nantes, was an actual witness of the accident. He was on the spot as a special precaution owing to the dangerous loop. “I noticed the driver pull up sharply and reverse,” M. Halgand said. “As he reached the loop, a rail bent up into the air and there was a sheet of flame.” The driver was given special instructions in an envelope at Angers, but is alleged to have admitted that he did not open it, assuming that it contained routine orders.

The official view is that the immediate cause of the disaster was the sudden application of the brakes when the driver, Cuzon, found that his train had been switched on to the side-line. Cuzon denies .that he was warned of line being under repair. He was merely' told that a certain signal was not working. “I did not see the two signals telling me to slow down to 18 miles an hour,” he said in an interview. “But when I found that I was not on the usual line, which. I know like the back of my hand, I applied the brakes, and the catastrophe followed.”