One freezing winter night during World War I, an overcrowded train nicknamed “The Ciurea Train” consisting of 26 cars, left Galați for Iași on Friday, 11 January 1917.  It headed for a descent toward Ciurea and was reaching its final leg. But this final part of the journey would be a tragic one.

Romania took sides with the French Anglo-Russian alliance in August 1916 and formally entered World War I. In the wake of nearly four months of violent fighting, on December 6, 1916, the German army ‎occupied Bucharest. The Romanian authorities fled the capital city, withdrawing to Moldavia in the north, but their withdrawal was simply chaotic.

As the Romanian army was withdrawing to Moldavia, a train was departing from Galati on December 30, 1916, at a time when the city of Galati was under German bombardment, and the German ‎occupation of the city could hardly be avoided. The train was overloaded, heading for Iasi.

Schedule Changes for The Ciurea Train

There was a couple of hours’ delay in the scheduled departure of the train. It was an overcrowded train, since many civilians were fleeing to Iași. Joining them were GIs who were on leave and obviously had to return to their military units; there were also several Russian soldiers on board the train.

‎‎The Courier left Galați for Lași and was running several hours late, as the station had been bombed by German airplanes and its locomotive had been hit by bombs and had to be replaced. The train included residents of Muntenia, who felt threatened by German bombs falling in nearby Galați as well as the occupation of Brăila by the German Army.

Amongst passengers on the train were students and soldiers on leave, as well as Romanians, Russian officers and members of the French military mission.

Some of the prominently known travellers onboard the train were:

• Emil Costinescu, a former Minister of Finance,
• Yvonne Blondel, daughter of a former French ambassador to Bucharest,
• geographer George Vâlsan, and
• a French official, the Marquis de Belloy.

More cars were added as the train proceeded along its route, with the train sometimes waiting for hours as hundreds of travellers tried to find space. It became heavily overcrowded, with reports describing passengers riding in extremely poor conditions, including on roofs and between cars.

An Overloaded Train Ride

As The Ciurea Train continued along its route, travellers sitting on the roofs of the wagons died from the extremely cold temperature.

“To our horror, a man and a 10-year-old boy were taken down frozen; others were staggering, hardened by the cold. At some curves, many people, both men and women, had been thrown off the train,” Yvonne Blondel wrote.

The train stopped overnight in Bârlad after heavy snowfall had blocked the line, despite the efforts of soldiers and railwaymen to clear it. The following day, the train rolled on; there were 120 kilometers to roll before reaching Iasi.

The train hit the railway station of Ciurea at about 12 am, the locality and the railway station were just a couple of kilometers away from the city, which was lying along a valley. It was a harsh winter, and the snowfalls had been abundant. When the train began rolling downward along the slope, the crew members activated the brake system.

Unfortunately, the train was so crowded that the people who were responsible for the brakes could not activate the proper mechanism of the carriages, which had hand brakes that were manually operated for each carriage so that the train could be slowed down.

Emergency Signals from The Ciurea Train

‎Receiving signals sent by the engineers of the stricken locomotives, Ciurea railway station employees activated a switch. This way, the train would enter line 2 and avoid collision with other wagons filled with tar that were parked on line 1. Here is what happened.

• Due to the high speed and sharp angle, only the locomotive and one wagon managed to enter line 2, all but two of the other cars derailed.
• The train was rolling at high speed and ran off its rails.
• ‎The train derailed and collided with a locomotive standing on another line. The locomotive’s speedometer needle was found stuck at 95 km/h (59 mph), the probable speed of the train at the moment of the wreck. It seems that at least one of the wagons collided with some fuel tanks, triggering an explosion and a huge fire.
• The Ciurea Train burned in less than two hours.

What Happened to the Passengers on the Railway Platform?

At the railway station of Ciurea, all the rails were full of passenger carriages and cistern tanks with a liquid cargo of oil. When The Ciurea Train ran off its rails, it bumped into other carriages, which caused a terrible deflagration.

According to eyewitness accounts, the explosions were quite like ‎a small-scale earthquake.

1. Many people were thrown off in the snow
2. . More died because they were crushed between the carriages.
3. While others got killed in the explosions.
4. Estimates from that time reported as many as 1,000 deaths.

Yvonne Blondel was rescued by two soldiers of the French military mission, who pulled her out of the train wreck exactly when her clothes were ablaze. Other passengers died in the fire or were killed by the impact of the derailment.

Those traveling on the roofs of the wagons who weren’t already frozen were either thrown under the train cars and crushed or thrown into the snow.

‎” I had the feeling that I was thrown into the bottom of a pit, a rain of objects sliding around my body…”, How long did this torment last? A few minutes, but to me it seemed interminable…followed by the emergence of looters, who robbed the dead travellers”. An account of a French survivor who described the scene of the tragedy.

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The Aftermath: What Happened to the Survivors of The Ciurea Train?

Railway workers, soldiers, and others rushed to the scene. Survivors were taken toward Iași for medical treatment, while rescuers faced the enormous task of dealing with wreckage, fire, and victims.

World War I played a major role in Romanian history, and Romania was experiencing an enormous military and humanitarian crisis; government institutions had relocated, and contemporary documentation was limited.  Quite a few of the victims or their successors tried to file lawsuits against the Railway Company and the Romanian army to receive compensation.

The case stalled, obviously, and the legal conclusion was that the territory was under the jurisdiction of the army and the damage fell under the category of war damage. Oftentimes, the dead person takes all the blame in Romanian society.

All the inquiry committee chose to say was that, because of the people on board who blocked the maneuvers the personnel were supposed to make, the train could not be stopped. There is a similarity with another accident that happened in a similar context, this time in France.

`On December 12, 1917, in the region of Savoy, a train loaded with French soldiers who were on leave, as it was rolling along a hill, ran off its rails; the aftermath of that accident was about the same, and so were the conclusions of the inquiry.

Nobody was held accountable for that tragedy. That train was also overcrowded, and 400 people ‎died. A scapegoat hunt back then was purposefully avoided, and it was the war that pleaded guilty. The accident on The Ciurea Train, on New Year’s Eve of 1917, was quite uncommon at that time. However, the war itself is something that is quite uncommon.

Conclusion

The Ciurea railway disaster is one of history’s most disastrous tragedies. Partly because it is one of two major railway tragedies that occurred in 1917, during World War I.  Secondly, it remains surrounded by uncertainties about the exact death toll and cause.

The disaster wasn’t just simply a railway accident or a statistic from the chaos of World War I. Behind the uncertain number of casualties were hundreds of people- families, students, soldiers, workers, and ordinary travellers who boarded the train hoping to reach safety.

Some lost their lives, while others survived with memories that haunt them forever. More than a century later, the exact death toll may still be uncertain, but the immense tragedy is undeniable. Every speculated figure represents a person whose journey ended at Ciurea, and whose absence changed the lives of those they left behind.

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