Florence, 8 June 2024 – Railway emergency along the Pisa-Grosseto line, in the Telegrafo-Sassone-Romito tunnels between Livorno and Quercianella. The rescue teams engaged in a night-time exercise with the aim of verifying and consolidating the procedures and communication flows in the event of injury to the drivers of two trains, one regional and one freight. An initiative aimed at continuing continuous training on rail transport safety.
In the simulation, two trains passing through the Telegrafo tunnel, a freight train proceeding in a northerly direction and a passenger train in the opposite direction, hit a tarpaulin that was stuck on the electric traction cables. The tarpaulin, hitting between the two trains, caused the side windows of the driving cabs to break and injured the two train drivers. From here the call to the RFI operations room was made which alerted the 118 operations center, the railway police and FS Security to allow the intervention of the health workers. The 118 Operations Center sent medical personnel who, having entered the tunnel accompanied by RFI technicians, arrived at the locomotives and took care of the two injured people, then transferring them from the tunnel to the ambulance.
The exercise made it possible to monitor the effectiveness of the communication flows and the coordination chain, as well as the readiness of the interventions, allowing all the personnel involved to put into practice what they learned in the training phases, both in relation to the assistance of the personnel driving trains and transporting the wounded.
The peculiarity of the simulation is that the rescuers’ entrances were both from the north and south sides of the tunnel entrances, verifying the activation and coordination capacity between the 118 crews and the RFI teams in an infrastructural context of difficult accessibility. . The operations concluded successfully. The activity had no repercussions on train circulation.
