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.
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Sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening a polity, government, effort, or organization through subversion, obstruction, demoralization, destabilization, division, disruption, or destruction. One who engages in sabotage is a saboteur. Saboteurs typically try to conceal their identities because of the consequences of their actions and to avoid invoking legal and organizational requirements for addressing sabotage.
A train wreck, train collision, train accident or train crash is a type of disaster involving one or more trains. Train wrecks often occur as a result of miscommunication, as when a moving train meets another train on the same track; or an accident, such as when train wheels come off a track in a derailment; or when a boiler explosion occurs. Train wrecks have often been widely covered in popular media and in folklore.
The International Railway of Maine was a historic railroad constructed by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) between Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, and Mattawamkeag, Maine, closing a key gap in the railway's transcontinental main line to the port of Saint John, New Brunswick.
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 accident, which was reportedly due 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 Thamshavn Line was Norway's first electric railway, running from 1908 to 1974 in what is now Trøndelag county. Today it is operated as a heritage railway and is the world's oldest railway running on its original alternating current electrification scheme, using 6.6 kV 25 Hz AC. It was built to transport pyrites from the mines at Løkken Verk to the port at Thamshavn, as well as passengers. There were six stations: Thamshavn, Orkanger, Bårdshaug, Fannrem, Solbusøy and Svorkmo. The tracks were extended to Løkken Verk in 1910.
The Thamshavn Line sabotage was a series of sabotages against the railway Thamshavn Line in Orkdal, Norway during World War II. There were four separate sabotages, all performed by Company Linge in an attempt by the Norwegian resistance to prevent Germany from getting the pyrites that were being extracted at the mine at Løkken Verk.
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.
The Huntly rail bridge bombing occurred on the Glen Afton Branch, near Huntly, New Zealand around 3 a.m. on 30 April 1951, when high explosives were set off on a railway bridge. The bombing took place amid the 1951 New Zealand waterfront dispute, an industrial dispute over the working conditions and wages of dockworkers. Characterised by the-then Prime Minister Sidney Holland as an act of terrorism, the bombing caused no casualties, even though a morning passenger train ran over the weakened bridge. The perpetrators remain unknown.
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.
On the night of Wednesday, June 21, 1905, the New York Central Railroad's flagship passenger train, the 20th Century Limited, derailed in Mentor, Ohio, on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway line, killing 21 passengers and injuring more than 25 others on board. A switch from the mainline to a freight siding was open, causing the Limited to leave the mainline and overrun the siding at high speed. The cause of the accident was never officially determined, but overwhelming evidence points to an act of rail sabotage. The 20th Century Limited connected New York City to Chicago; its running time had just weeks earlier been reduced from 20 hours to 18.
Rail sabotage is one of the Belarusian forms of grassroots action opposing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Pro-democratic and pro-Ukrainian partisan movements have emerged in Belarus and Russia following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War. These resistance movements act against the authoritarian governments of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and Vladimir Putin in Russia, as well as against civilian supporters of these authorities and the armed forces of both countries, with the aim of stopping the war.
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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