Suffocation

For a long time, people didn’t understand the dangers of carbon monoxide. These days, we know wat can happen, but on March 2, 1944, when a train stopped in a tunnel near Salerno, Italy, it was a recipe for disaster. The train had more than 500 people on board, and before long, they were dead. The tunnel they stopped in with the train running caused dangerous levels of carbon monoxide and that caused the people to suffocate and die. The details of the incident, which occurred in the midst of World War II, were not revealed at the time and remain somewhat murky today as well.

Train Number 8017 left Salerno heading for the rural area south of the city through the Apennine Mountains, where they would encounter the tunnel. The train was a freight train, and it was not supposed to carry passengers. Nevertheless, it was common at the time for both soldiers and civilians to hitch rides on any convenient train. It was a habit they would regret…had they lived. As they were passing through the towns of Eboli, Persano, and Romagnano, train number 8017 had picked up approximately 650 passengers by the time it reached Balvano.

Balvano was a tiny town located between two long tunnels in the Apennines. On that fateful day, it was raining as train number 8017 began to ascend the Galleria delle Armi tunnel pass located just outside of Balvano. Almost immediately, the train was forced to stop. The reasons for the stop vary, with some saying the train was unable to pull the overloaded freight cars up the slope, while others say 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. Had the train been burning high-grade coal, the problem may not have occurred, but during World War II, high-grade coal was hard to come by, so the train was burning a low-grade coal substitute which produced an excess of odorless and toxic carbon monoxide.

During that 30-minute stop, approximately 520 of the train’s passengers were asphyxiated by the carbon monoxide as they sat in the train. The Italian government, who like every other nation, was in the midst of an intense war effort, kept a lid on the story, so 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. That is the reason why little was known then, and details are sketchy to this day.