Rail sabotage (colloquially known as wrecking) is the act of disrupting a rail transport network. This includes both acts designed only to hinder or delay as well as acts designed to actually destroy a train. Railway sabotage requires considerable effort, due to the design and heavy weight of railways.
Sabotage must be distinguished from more blatant methods of disruption (e.g., blowing up a train, train robbery).
In 2022, setting fire to rail relay cabinets that control track operations [1] was a common method of sabotage during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
A train accident or train wreck is a type of disaster involving two or more trains. Train wrecks often occur as a result of miscommunication, as when a moving train meets another train on the same track, when the wheels of train come off the track or when a boiler explosion occurs. Train accidents have often been widely covered in popular media and in folklore.
The 1995 Palo Verde derailment took place on October 9, 1995, when Amtrak's Sunset Limited was derailed by saboteurs near Palo Verde, Arizona on Southern Pacific Railroad tracks. Two locomotives, Amtrak GE P32-8BWH #511 leading and EMD F40PHR #398 trailing, and eight of twelve cars derailed, four of them falling 30 feet off a trestle bridge into a dry river bed. Mitchell Bates, a sleeping car attendant, was killed. Seventy-eight people were injured, 12 of them seriously and 25 were hospitalized.
The Rafiganj rail disaster was the derailment of a train on a bridge over the Dhave River in North-Central India, on 10 September 2002. At least 130 people were killed in the crash, which was attributed in some reports to sabotage by a local Maoist terrorist group, the Naxalites.
The Kurnool train crash was the derailment and crash of a passenger train in Kurnool district in Andhra Pradesh, India, on 21 December 2002.
The 1915 Vanceboro international bridge bombing was an attempt to destroy the Saint Croix–Vanceboro Railway Bridge on February 2, 1915, by Imperial German spies.
On August 12, 1939, the City of San Francisco train derailed outside of Harney, Nevada, United States, killing 24 and injuring 121 passengers and crew. The derailment was caused by sabotage of the tracks. Despite a manhunt, reward offers, and years of investigation by the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP), the case remains unsolved.
The rail war began in different regions of Russia in the spring of 2022 after a similar rail war in Belarus.
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