Background
Rometta is a municipality of 6532 (as of 2012) on the northeastern corner of the Italian Island of Sicily, located 178km/111mi east of Palermo (the regional capitol) and 84km/52mi north of Catania (both measurements in linear distance).
The municipality lies on the Palermo-Messina rail line, a mostly dual-tracked electrified rail line which forms part of the European Berlin-Palermo rail corridor as it takes trains which arrive at Messina by ship from the Italian mainland to the island’s main city. The line originally opened in the late 1890s and was extensively rebuilt (and rerouted) since the 1980s, allowing double-tracking and higher speeds. Rometta Messina is a four-tracked station on the line, serving the town of Rometta in the municipality of Messina.
The Train Involved
Train number 1932, named the “Freccia della Laguna” (Arrow of the Lagoon), was an overnight express passenger servce from Palermo to Venice, consisting of seven four-axle express passenger cars, some of which were set up as sleeper- or couchette-cars for more comfortable sleeping during the nighttime phase of the trip. It had left Palermo’s main station at 4:00pm and was scheduled to reach Venice at 10:10am the next day. The train was pulled by FS (Italian national railway) E.656 032 and carried 190 passengers at the time of the accident. The Class E.656 is a six-axle two-section electric multipurpose locomotive introduced in 1975. The 18.29m/60ft long locomotive is split into two permanently-coupled sections, with the articulation allowing for tighter curve-radii, and rides on three two-axle bogies. The type weighs 120 metric tons and can reach a top speed of 150kph/93mph.
The Accident
Express train 1932 is approaching Rometta Messina station at 6:53pm on the 20th of July 2002, obeying the 120kph/75mph speed limit at 105kph/65mph. The train passes over a small bridge to the immediate west of the station at 6:56pm and then, seemingly without warning, goes off the rails at the following set of points, heading off the track to the right. The locomotive demolishes the railing of a second bridge, spinning around from the resistance which tears it off its train. The train cars manage to miss the massive obstacle now in their path, being forced further off-course by the locomotive spinning around. The leading car proceeds to slam into and move through a house by the side of the rail line, being turned sideways along the way.
The locomotive, overtaken by the leading three cars, comes to a halt partway over the edge of a 7m/23ft cliff adjacent to the second bridge while cars 2 and 3, after also impacting the partially collapsed house, come to a rest past the second bridge with car 2 almost parallel to the leading car. The rest of the train stays somewhat aligned with the rail line, with the last two cars remaining on track. 7 passengers and one of the train drivers are killed in the accident, with another 47 people being injured to a degree requiring hospitalization.
Aftermath
Local residents, including the mayor, beat professional responders to the site after they were alerted by the noise of the derailment. Among the responding locals was Mister Carini, who had been working in his vegetable garden when one of the train cars slid into it. He survived as the train car came to a halt upright, he would have become one of the victims if it had fallen over. The locals ensured that no survivors wandered off and tried to render aid to those who couldn’t leave the train on their own, but found themselves overwhelmed both by their lack of equipment and the sheer size of the accident. Professional responders arrived a few minutes after the accident, with a group of locals helping them orientate themselves across the sprawling wreckage. The firefighters were soon supported by a specialized mountain rescue crew, improving access, and the Italian army, while the navy placed additional rescue helicopters on standby.
The house which the train had crashed through was left missing about 2/3 of itself, leaving it too unstable to approach for a search. It was an old depot building owned by the FS and had housed three railwaymen’s families who luckily weren’t home when the train obliterated the building.
Firefighters focused on trying to stabilize the 60-ton section of the locomotive dangling over the cliff, held in place largely by being in a delicate balance by coincidence. It was still attached to the rear half of the locomotive, but that wouldn’t keep it from tipping downwards if its balance was disturbed. They started cutting their way into the driver’s cab to reach the surviving train driver, 36 years old Mister Raneri, once they could approach the wreck without too much risk of it falling onto them. An hour had passed since the accident by the time they got to Mister Raneri, finding him pinned and severely injured. Medics eventually chose to sedate him in the cab and amputate his legs in order to safe his life.
Initial suspicion was placed on the collapsed bridge just ahead of the points, speculating that the collapse of the bridge under the train’s wheels caused the derailment. However, the damage to the forward part of the train and the fact that the entire train had crossed the bridge caused the theory to be thrown out. The next theory to be questioned was if the locomotive had suffered a suspension failure on one of its bogies, be it in the form of an axle fracture or a failure of the frame itself. However, this theory was silenced when the FS provided documentation of an extensive inspection just one month before the accident, since which the locomotive had only covered about 6000km/3700mi.
Investigators proceeded to suspect a defect in the tracks, but were told that the section of track where the accident occurred had undergone maintenance just three days before the accident. Records were then presented to the investigation showing reports from several train drivers reporting uncharacteristic and/or extensive swaying-motions when passing over the set of points. These reports were backed up by the widow of the deceased train driver, who said that her husband had frequently complained about an “unstable feeling” when driving the route through Rometta Messina station.
The set of points at the site had been just about destroyed in the derailment, making it impossible to confidently tell its condition before the accident, but investigators found “skid marks” in the gravel ballast and on sleepers (the wooden beams connecting the rails) a short distance before the point of derailment which indicated that both the rails on the sleepers had moved laterally and the track as a whole had had excessive freedom of lateral movement.
The investigation thus concluded that the maintenance performed on the tracks had failed to completely fix a preexisting issue with the construction of the track in the area, leaving it unstable and thus able to shift under the weight of the train. Several trains passed over the spot between the maintenance and the accident, perhaps worsening whatever was wrong with the rails in that place, until it shifted so much under the weight of train number 1932 that the locomotive could not be contained and derailed, either from misalignment with the next section of track or from a widening of the track gauge (the distance between the rails).
The public prosecutor’s office for the municipality of Rometta proceeded to file charges surrounding several counts of manslaughter and causing a railway accident against four individuals, those being the head of the company who had performed the maintenance at the site and the three railway workers who had signed off on the section of track being ready to return to service. Proceedings dragged on for 9 years before, in 2011, the four men were found guilty of causing a railway accident, but the charges of manslaughter (for which the public prosecutor had demanded 27 years in jail for each defendant) were dropped as their prescriptive period had expired meaning they now lay too far in the past to sentence someone for. The defendants protested the ruling, with a court of appeals confirming the guilt of two workers (but at the same time pardoned their sentences) while the head of the company and the third worker were declared not guilty.
Six train cars and the locomotive, all of which had been deemed to be beyond economical repair, had spent all those years sitting on an overgrown property next to the site, even being visible on google earth (and still being visible through the “older footage”-function). Three of the train cars and the locomotive were moved to a different nearby site in 2004, but it took until 2014 for the FS to have the wreckage broken up for scrap, having perhaps taken so long in an attempt to find a way that would avoid the removal’s cost of over 140 thousand euros (153750 USD as of 2024).
A small memorial can be found in the garden of “Villa Martina” in Rometta, consisting of a flowerbed surrounding a plaque with the names of the victims. Locals planted an olive tree at the memorial in 2014, symbolizing the hope for progress signaled by the FS finally removing the wreckage from its long-term storage at the site. The fact that the removal of the wreckage took so many years, according to locals, was a sign of Sicily being ignored regarding infrastructure, having to deal with old, often single-track rail lines while the rest of Italy gets seemingly endless sums invested in high speed rail lines and new rolling stock.
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