On the night of June 3–4, 1989, a train acci­dent occurred near Ufa, the likes of which had no ana­logues in either Russ­ian or world his­to­ry. The cause of the acci­dent was a gas explo­sion that leaked from a near­by pipeline. A ter­ri­ble train acci­dent on the Asha-Ufa sec­tion of the road claimed the lives of almost 600 peo­ple, a third of whom were chil­dren.

Accord­ing to offi­cial data, on trains No. 211 Novosi­birsk — Adler and No. 212 Adler — Novosi­birsk there were 1,370 peo­ple, includ­ing 383 chil­dren. How­ev­er, tick­ets for chil­dren under five years of age were not sold, and peo­ple trav­eled with their entire fam­i­lies to and from vaca­tion. Accord­ing­ly, there could have been sig­nif­i­cant­ly more peo­ple.

The force of the explo­sion is esti­mat­ed to be 300 tons of TNT. The explo­sion destroyed two trains that, by a fate­ful coin­ci­dence, met at the 1710th kilo­me­ter of the Trans-Siber­ian Rail­way — burned out and bent cars, twist­ed rails and hun­dreds of burned peo­ple. Eleven cars derailed, sev­en of them burned to the ground. It is unknown why the gas mix­ture flared up, and there is still debate about what led to the for­ma­tion of a crack in the pipe and a gas leak.

As for the caus­es of gas leaks from the gas pipeline, every­thing is much more com­pli­cat­ed. Accord­ing to the offi­cial ver­sion, the pipeline was a “time bomb” — it was dam­aged by an exca­va­tor buck­et dur­ing con­struc­tion in Octo­ber 1985, and under the influ­ence of con­stant loads a crack appeared at the site of the dam­age. Accord­ing to this ver­sion, a crack in the pipeline opened just 40 min­utes before the acci­dent, and dur­ing this time quite a lot of gas accu­mu­lat­ed in the low­land.

The two trains met at the 1710th kilo­me­ter of the Trans-Siber­ian Rail­way at 1:14 a.m., where an acci­den­tal spark from pro­longed brak­ing (or per­haps from a dis­card­ed cig­a­rette butt) ignit­ed a gas lake. The explo­sion turned the road, the for­est and two trains into a pitch-black blaz­ing infer­no.

More than 250 peo­ple were instant­ly burned in a gigan­tic fire. It is impos­si­ble to give exact num­bers. At the epi­cen­ter of the explo­sion, the tem­per­a­ture reached 1000 degrees, every­thing melt­ed. There was noth­ing left of many pas­sen­gers. Many of the burned peo­ple were already dying in hos­pi­tals — 317 peo­ple were tak­en there. Peo­ple died in fam­i­lies, chil­dren — in entire class­es, along with the teach­ers who accom­pa­nied them on vaca­tion. There was noth­ing left of many that could be iden­ti­fied or buried. About 700 peo­ple received var­i­ous injuries, many remained dis­abled for life.

Pipeline PK-1086 was closed and dis­man­tled. The filled-in low­land was plant­ed with new trees. In 1992, a memo­r­i­al was opened and a new plat­form “1710th kilo­me­ter” appeared, near which all trains stop.