The 1946 accident on the Rampe de Laffrey was the first in a string of fatal accidents along a stretch of road

Rampe de Laffrey

The Rampe de Laffrey is a section of France's Route nationale 85, today called the Route Napoléon, located in the department of Isère between the communes of Laffrey and Vizille, about fifteen kilometers southeast of Grenoble...

 which has been claimed as one of the deadliest in France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

. 18 people were killed when a bus

Bus

A bus is a road vehicle designed to carry passengers. Buses can have a capacity as high as 300 passengers. The most common type of bus is the single-decker bus, with larger loads carried by double-decker buses and articulated buses, and smaller loads carried by midibuses and minibuses; coaches are...

 lost the use of its brake

Brake

A brake is a mechanical device which inhibits motion. Its opposite component is a clutch. The rest of this article is dedicated to various types of vehicular brakes....

s, flying off the road and into a ravine

Ravine

A ravine is a landform narrower than a canyon and is often the product of streamcutting erosion. Ravines are typically classified as larger in scale than gullies, although smaller than valleys. A ravine is generally a fluvial slope landform of relatively steep sides, on the order of twenty to...

 along the Romanche

Romanche

The Romanche is a 78 km long mountain river in southeastern France, right tributary of the Drac . Its source is in the northern part of the Massif des Écrins, Dauphiné Alps. It flows into the Drac in Champ-sur-Drac, south of Grenoble. The road from Grenoble to Briançon over the Col du Lautaret runs...

; the bus was transporting pilgrim

Pilgrim

A pilgrim is a traveler who is on a journey to a holy place. Typically, this is a physical journeying to some place of special significance to the adherent of a particular religious belief system...

s from Beaujolais

Beaujolais

Beaujolais is a French Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée wine generally made of the Gamay grape which has a thin skin and is low in tannins. Like most AOC wines they are not labeled varietally. Whites from the region, which make up only 1% of its production, are made mostly with Chardonnay grapes...

 on a return journey from Our Lady of La Salette

Our Lady of La Salette

La Salette is a small mountaintop village near Grenoble, France. It is most noted for an apparition of the Virgin Mary that was reported in 1846 by two shepherd children, Mélanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud, followed by numerous accounts of miraculous healings....

, where they had been celebrating the Marian Year. A memorial to the dead was later erected near the town of Saint-Pierre-de-Mésage

Saint-Pierre-de-Mésage

Saint-Pierre-de-Mésage is a commune in the Isère department in south-eastern France.Saint-Pierre-de-Mésage is located next to the mountain of Connex and between the Vercors and Taillefer. Near Vizille and Grenoble....

, close to the accident site.

Ten years later, a similar accident, caused by the same type of malfunction, befell a Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

tourist bus at the same location, killing seven.