Passengers of a couchette carriage o the train travelling from Varna to Sofia had to be evacuated on the night of May 10 after one of the passengers smelled smoke, private broadcaster bTV said on May 11.

According to Bulgarian state railways BDZ, the smoke was the result of overheated brakes and there was no fire. One of the passengers, Maria Boyadjieva, however, told bTV that she saw the flames when she left the coach at Tarnak station.      

“We saw how police officers put down the fire by using fire extinguishers,” she said. “I was asleep when the incident happened. A woman started knocking on the doors and shouting for people to wake up and leave the carriage and thanks to her we managed to get down,” she said.

“At that point I was only imagining what might have happened, given the fact that there was a nearby cargo train with fuel tanks.”

According to Metodi Denev, who was on duty at BDZ Sofia station at the time of the incident, the report he got said nothing about fire. “It was the brakes that overheated and passengers were in no danger,” he told bTV. “There was only smoke”.

The carriage was left at the station and the train continued its way to Sofia. According to Boyadjieva, BDZ lacked emergency hot lines. “No one from my relatives was able to get information from BDZ bout the incident,” she said. BDZ confirmed that before bTV.

According to the company information about the movement on the trains was available only during working hours and passengers had themselves to blame for stealing fire extinguisher from the carriages.

The incident comes two and a half months after a hellish fire on the Sofia-Kardam train took the lives of nine passengers on February 28. As the train was entering the town of Cherven Bryag, the fire started in a couchette carriage, which had 35 people in it at the time, and then spread to a sleeping coach with 27 people.