On the way to family and loved ones, things went terribly wrong on the railway near Beilen on Christmas Eve 1913. Several people die in a train accident. A disaster with consequences in the field of accident investigation.
It is around seven o’clock when the train at the station in Groningen fills up with passengers. An extra long train with hundreds of travelers on their way to celebrate Christmas in another city.
People from all walks of life step in, such as 41-year-old Johannes Pieter Punt. He is an advisor to a life insurance company in The Hague and suspects that the Christmas tree at home has been decorated by his family. He gets to the station just in time to catch the train. He played checkers all afternoon, but he skipped a train earlier to play a game.
Jacobus Cort van der Linden is also looking for a place. The music lover is an important civil servant in Groningen and on his way to his parents in The Hague. He chooses a non-smoking compartment, together with his friend, the doctor Jan Govert Roosenburg. Also on board are the couple Kapteyn-Van der Werff from Leiden and Hillegonda Aleida van Zanten, a 37-year-old seamstress who is going to say goodbye to her sister in Zwolle who is leaving for America.
The locomotive gets underway with some delay. The train cuts through the dark winter landscape. Things go wrong near Beilen. Immediately after crossing the Haler Bridge over the Oranjekanaal, the rear wagons derailed and one tipped over. In the front compartments no one notices anything, but in the rear compartments fellow passengers are launched, some are thrown from the train, end up on the track and are crushed by the last wagon.
When all the aircraft have come to a stop, the sight is gruesome. At least as far as can be seen, in the pitch-black night in the Drenthe countryside, the darkness conceals a lot of suffering. The victims are unrecognizable. Mutilated. Tattered. Limbs, intestines and even a head lie loose from the torso near the track.