The Ciurea railway disaster (13 January 1917): a source census of the C.F.R. Contentious Department files at the Romanian National Archives, with preliminary transcriptions

A census of the archival material relating to the Ciurea railway disaster of the night of 30/31 December 1916 (Julian) = 12/13 January 1917 (Gregorian), held by the Romanian National Archives (ANIC) in the fond of the C.F.R. Contentious Department, together with preliminary transcriptions of documents from it. Part 1 describes which dossiers of the fond contain Ciurea material, what each contains, the foliation convention of the files, and what the files' own reader-registration slips record. Part 2 gives the Romanian text of the report of the Superior Commission of Inquiry of 24 January 1917 (five pages), selected depositions taken by that commission on 14, 15 and 20 January 1917, and three witness depositions taken in court in 1921, each with an English rendering and with every uncertain reading marked. This deposit contains no images and no interpretation of the cause of the accident. It exists to make the documents citable and to date the readings. Version 0.9 is preliminary. The transcriptions are the work of an editor who is not a native speaker of Romanian and have not yet been reviewed by a native reader. Divergences between the several certified copies of these documents are recorded rather than resolved, and collating them is one of the purposes of this edition; a file of editorial notes sets out the conventions, the divergent readings and the scope of the edition. Corrections are welcome. The documents are held by ANIC. The photographs from which the transcriptions were made were taken at ANIC on 30 October 2024 by Dr. Dorin Stănescu and shared with the author for research; they are his work and are not reproduced here.