Disaster on Wheels

Christmas in pastoral Bessarabia is visiting time. This Christmas a bitter, blizzardy Rumanian winter swept down off the Carpathians but the quaint railway cars that spin from Kishinev down to Galatz, Braila and Bucharest were thronged with festive, gaily-cloaked peasants visiting from village to village. East of Galatz two holiday trains sped along the winding, single-track line in a blinding storm. Someone had blundered, for they were running head on toward each other. Near Reni they crashed. For hours the dying lay with the dead in the heaping snow while rescue trains ploughed through from Galatz. Late Christmas night the dead were counted at 80, the wounded, 259.

> From the AffonsoArinos school at Bello-Horizonte, some 300 miles across the steep slopes of the Serra da Mantiqueira range from Rio de Janeiro, last week a boisterous troop of boys raced for the depot of the Central do Brazil railway. They clambered into the nine creaking wooden coaches and snuggled down for the ecstatic ride home for Christmas. Winding south, the train picked up more passengers including laborers on their way to Sao Paulo farms.

At Barbacena it began the laborious ascent of the single-track over the Manti-queiras. Near the town of Stio came catastrophe. Again, someone had blundered, for thundering down the mountain through signals came a heavily laden freight. Headlight to headlight the roaring freight and the snorting passenger train met. They disintegrated over the grade like kindling. Soon fire crackled through the broken sticks and torn bodies.

Three students were among the 59 dead, 15 of them among 66 wounded and dying.

>More rugged than Brazil's coastal slopes are the rocky volcanic upjuts that wall Mexico City. One rail route down to the Gulf at Veracruz skirts the hills around Tlaxcala, 45 miles east of Mexico City. One morning last week more than 1,000 Government employes and their families, off for a collective workers' Christmas holiday, jammed their way into seven obsolete wooden, second-class cars, equipped inside with long, hard, wooden benches. Seven classier steel cars completed the train. Rounding a curve on a downgrade near Tlaxcala, the locomotive broke an axle, jumped the track and spilled all 14 coaches down the slope. Toll: according to press reports, 40 dead, 51 injured; according to the Mexican Railway, four or five dead, 30 injured.

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