Communist Poland's secret rail disasters

Friday night's tragedy at Szczekociny will no doubt be in the headlines for some time to come - until the causes have been identified (this is no place to speculate on those). While reading about Polish railways' safety record, I came across mention of two undocumented rail disasters that seem to be rumour circulating around the internet, but with enough truth in them to suggest that something did happen.

The first reputedly occurred on 22 October 1949 at Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki (not far from what will soon be Warsaw's second airport, Modlin) and claimed the lives of 200 people. It is listed as the world's 26th deadliest railway accident on this Wikipedia page. News of the disaster was allegedly suppressed by the Stalinist authorities, it was picked up by two local newspapers in the US two days later - one in Reno, Nevada and one in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

The second is said to have happened some time in 1952 in the town of Rzepin, close to the East German border, and killed 150 people, mostly Soviet soldiers. It is said to have been sabotage, a bomb placed under a small bridge. This is the main Berlin-Warsaw line. Another version claims 160 killed, Polish civilians, on a train going too quickly around a tight curve.

Seeking information about both of these disasters leads to the same sources cited repeatedly on dozens of different websites, with no new or original information.

I would be grateful for any information about either of these two disasters - were these exaggerations of hearsay? Chinese whispers? Total fabrications? Or did they really happen?

James Oberg's 1988 book, Uncovering Soviet Disasters, published after Gorbachev announced glasnost, tells of such rumoured accidents on a massive scale. The book is full of train crashes and aircrashes involving hundreds of people that never officially happened - right up to the mid-1980s. Next-of-kin were not even informed; loved ones set off never to return - leaving their families to find out what happened. News of epidemics, accidents in mines, nuclear installations, military testing grounds was censored; the Stalinist period of course being the most restrictive in this scope.

Silencing such stories led to people's natural propensity for rumour-mongering to spread out of control; numbers of casualties would become exaggerated for sake of story-telling effect, so the truth is hard to establish.

The secrecy of the communist era creates an fascinating field of research for historians. Fortunately, there are still people alive from those days who might be able to confirm or deny such events.

Incidentally, the UK's record in recent years in terms of rail safety is comparable to Poland's. Below: 10-second CCTV footage of the Southall rail disaster of 1997 that killed seven people.



Since 1990, Poland has had 15 fatal train crashes that left a total of 75 people dead. The UK has had 16 fatal train crashes claiming 83 lives. Interestingly, the deadliest period was while the track infrastructure was in private hands, since Railtrack was re-nationalised, there have been no major disasters like the one above.

The above scale of death pales into total insignificance when set beside the number of fatalities from road traffic accidents, which in the case of Poland is in the order of 65,000 - 70,000.

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This time two years ago:
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