The 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami train wreck is the deadliest recorded train disaster in history, claiming the lives of at least 1,700 people.
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Worst accidentsThe worst accident was the Quintinshill rail disaster in Scotland in 1915 with 226 dead and 246 injured. Second worst, and the worst in England, was the 1952 Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash, which killed 112 people and injured 340.
In 2022, there were more than 1,000 train derailments in the U.S. There were at least 1,164 train derailments across the country last year, according to data from the Federal Railroad Administration. That means the country is averaging roughly three derailments per day.
1650. England – Whickham, County Durham. Two boys die when they are run over by a wagon on a wooden coal train way. While such tramway accidents are not generally listed as rail accidents (note the lack of accidents listed for the next 163 years) this is sometimes cited as the earliest-known railway accident.
1830. 15 September – United Kingdom – William Huskisson becomes the first widely reported passenger train death. During the ceremonial opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, while standing on the track at Parkside, he is struck and fatally injured by the locomotive Rocket.
Balasore, Odisha — Mohammad Afzal survived one of the worst train accidents in India's history, but remained in a state of high anxiety, unable to locate his friend who was in the same coach.
There were eight non-workforce fatalities (passenger or public) in the year April 2022 to March 2023: three occurred in mainline stations and two at the platform-train interface; two passenger fatalities at stations on the London Underground; and one fatality from a collision between a member of the public and a tram.
Nonetheless, the blemishes on the record have been appearing with concerning regularity in recent years. Until 2020, the 2007 derailment in Grayrigg was the last time a passenger died in a UK train crash – a huge turnaround after a succession of terrible accidents in the days of Railtrack around the millennium.
CSX #8888, an SD40-2, ran away under power without a crew after the engineer incorrectly set the locomotive's dynamic brake and was unable to get back into the locomotive after it began moving.
On 28 February 1975 a southbound Northern City Line train crashed into the tunnel end beyond the platform at Moorgate station. Forty-three people were killed in what was the greatest loss of life on the Underground in peacetime.
Has the bullet train ever had an accident? In 2011, a high-speed bullet train crashed near the south-eastern city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang province, killing 40 people. The Chinese government later admitted that the crash was caused by design flaws and sloppy management.
1. Begunkodor Railway Station, West Bengal. Located in a remote village in West Bengal, this station is reportedly haunted by a white-sari draped spectral, the ghost of a lady who was run over by a train there.
Brightline train service has highest US death rateAccording to an ongoing Associated Press analysis of federal data that began in 2019, the high-speed train has the highest death rate in the country.