Tangled Cars and Billowing Smoke: Remembering Hinton Rail Disaster 40 Years Later

An aerial view of the wreckage of the 1986 Hinton train collision, is shown in this handout photo. (The Canadian Press/Handout—Commission of Inquiry, Hinton Train Collision）

Colin Hanington followed a plume of smoke to reach one of the deadliest railway crashes in Canadian history, and almost 40 years later remembers the silence when he got there.

Hanington was volunteer firefighter doing what he could to help after a CN Rail freight train and a Via Rail Super Continental passenger train collided east of Hinton, Alta., on Feb. 8, 1986.