Curinga train disaster

Being in a dark night and the runaway cars missing their tail lights (electricity is provided by the engine), the available distance was far too short to stop the passenger train.

Railway crews immediately begun to remove and dismantle the damaged coaches, in order to allow recover of the wounded trapped in the wreck, aided by the security forces personnel.

Public Prosecutor’s Office charged the freight train drivers, the Eccellente stationmaster and a railwayman with involuntary manslaughter, for failing to notice the loss of the boxcars.

An early technical survey showed that maintenance status of the rolling stock was fair, track infrastructure was good and adequate to current safety standards.

The semi-automatic block signaling was active at the moment, but that system required a routine check of passing trains to be done by station personnel.

Fully automatic block control would have avoided the tragedy (flashing a red light at the passenger train), but up until the 1990s was installed only on high capacity main lines (about 1/8 of the total network).