Iron Catastrophes: A Global History of Train Disasters

From the dawn of the railway age to the sleek high‐speed trains of the twenty‐first century, the story of the railroad has always carried a double edge—an instrument of triumph and transformation, and at the same time an arena of grief and devastation. Iron Catastrophes: A Global History of Train Disasters is a sweeping chronicle of how progress raced forward on steel tracks while continually stumbling into tragedy.

This book journeys across continents and centuries to chart the history of railway disasters in all their complex dimensions. Beginning with the earliest accidents of the nineteenth century, when untested locomotives burst their boilers or derailed on fragile tracks, it shows how railway travel was stamped by peril from its very birth. The death of British politician William Huskisson in 1830, struck down on the Liverpool and Manchester line’s opening day, symbolized how quickly innovation could turn lethal. Soon after came infernos, collisions in the fog, bridge collapses, and explosions that shocked a society intoxicated by speed yet horrified by risk.

The narrative then widens to explore disasters across Europe, America, Asia, Africa, and the colonial world. Chapters recount Europe’s notorious horrors—from Britain’s Harrow collision to France’s Versailles fire and Spain’s Torre del Bierzo tragedy—where crashes shattered faith in modernity. In America, endless expansion created reckless improvisations: wooden bridges that collapsed, locomotives that burned, collisions that littered small towns with wreckage. In Asia, the disasters grew on an almost unimaginable scale. India’s catastrophic wrecks, Japan’s cultural trauma at Amagasaki, Sri Lanka’s tsunami train engulfed by waves, and China’s modern tragedy at Wenzhou illustrate that even regions most reliant on the rails suffered losses measured in the thousands.