Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne derailment

On the night of 12/13 December 1917 a military train carrying about a thousand French soldiers from the Italian front home on leave derailed in the Maurienne valley in Savoy. The overloaded train ran away on the steep descent from Modane and crashed just before the station at Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne, and the wooden carriages burned. At least 425 soldiers were killed. It was, and remains to this day, the deadliest railway disaster in French history.

The leave train

After the defeat at Caporetto France sent to Italy six divisions under the command of General Marie Émile Fayolle. Once the front on the Piave and Monte Grappa had stabilised, Fayolle granted leave to soldiers who had previously fought for a long time in France. From the end of November the military transport directorate ran a daily train from Vicenza for about 600 men on leave, and for the trains of 11 and 12 December this number was doubled. The train that left Bassano del Grappa on 11 December carried about a thousand soldiers, mainly from the 46th and 47th Divisions, in seventeen Italian-built wooden carriages. Before the climb to the Fréjus Tunnel, also known as the Mont Cenis Tunnel, it was divided into two parts, and at Modane, already on the French side, it was put back together into a single train hauled by one locomotive. It was about 350 metres long and weighed more than 520 tonnes. Some of the officers changed at Modane to an express for Paris.

According to the findings of André Pallatier, one of the first to study the archives opened in 2007, all the carriages had continuous brakes, but before departure they were left working only on the luggage van at the front and the first two carriages. The rest of the train was to be braked by hand by seven brakemen at the signal of the locomotive’s whistle, as on goods trains, the category in which the railway placed military trains. On the stretch to Saint-Michel the line descends on average by 22 metres per kilometre, and in places by 30 metres. According to an often repeated account, the driver Louis Girard protested that he could not hold such a heavy train with one locomotive, but a military transport officer ordered him to set off.

The disaster

According to Pallatier the train left Modane at 10.47 p.m. (older accounts give 11 p.m. or 11.15 p.m.). Beyond Le Freney it began to pick up speed that the brakes could no longer check. The locomotive’s recorder registered 135 kilometres per hour, where 40 was permitted at the point of derailment. Near the bridge over the Arc, about 1,300 metres before the station at Saint-Michel, the first carriage left the rails. The coupling behind the tender broke, and the carriages telescoped into one another and smashed against the retaining wall in a narrow cutting near the hamlet of La Saussaz. Girard, who at first did not notice that he had lost his train, reached the station with the locomotive alone and survived. With railwaymen and Scottish soldiers who were waiting there for a train to Italy he ran to rescue the injured. The stationmaster at La Praz, who had seen the train hurtling past, managed to warn Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, where the departure of a train carrying British soldiers was held back.

Half an hour or three quarters of an hour after the derailment a fire broke out that consumed the wreck until the evening of the following day. Its cause was never established: it may have been axles glowing from braking, or the candles with which the soldiers lit the carriages, because the electric lighting in them did not work. Some accounts also mention grenades and ammunition carried by the men on leave. Fourteen carriages burned, and recovering the bodies and clearing the line took five days.

Victims and silence

The number of victims was long disputed. In March 1919 the court at Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne officially established that 425 soldiers had died at the scene, and this figure was inscribed on the memorials. According to Pallatier a total of 435 people died: 433 soldiers, including 8 who died in hospital, and 2 railwaymen, while 194 injured were taken to hospital. Most of the dead could not be identified. Many other accounts give at least 675 dead, and figures of 800 and even more than a thousand circulated. The exact number of those on board is not known, because soldiers got on and off along the way.

The disaster was subject to censorship. The French press wrote little about it: Le Figaro devoted twenty-one lines to it on 17 December, and Le Petit Journal noted on 18 December that only now was it allowed to give details. A solemn funeral for the victims was held at Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne in the presence of the ministers of public works and justice and of French, British and Italian troops. The case was taken over by a court martial, which later acquitted six railwaymen of the PLM company, among them the driver. The military and railway files remained closed for ninety years. In 1923 the Minister of War, André Maginot, unveiled a memorial to the victims in the cemetery at Saint-Michel. The disaster claimed more than twice as many victims as the second deadliest railway accident in France, at Lagny-Pomponne in 1933, and yet amid the enormity of wartime losses it was quickly forgotten.