Transport: 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...