SIDE-TRACKED TO SYDNEY

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23740, 11 September 1942, Page 4

SIDE-TRACKED TO SYDNEY

MELBOURNE PASSENGERS’ TRIP AN ERROR IN SHUNTING (0.C.) SYDNEY. September 4. Through an error in shunting, 15 passengers who went to bed in a Mel-bourne-bound sleeping carriage at Canberra on Tuesday night woke at Sydney central railway station on Wednesday morning. The passengers were given accommodation on Wednesday night's Melbourne express and reached their destination 24 hours late. The train, which left Canberra at 8.55 p.m., had three sleeping cars, one carrying Melbourne-bound passengers, one with passengers for Sydney, and one empty, to be sent to Albury, on the New South Wales-Victorian border. When the train reached Goulburn, where the connexions were to be made, the Melbourne-bound carriage was mistakenly hooked on behind the Sydney sleeper. Unaware of the blunder, the 12 nfen and three women passengers slept soundly while their train roared through the night—in the wrong direction for them. First of the 15 to realise the error was Mr E. Satterly, of the Department of Home Security. Travelling with a departmental colleague, Mr H. L. Wilson, he awoke a few minutes before 5 a.m., looked out of the window—and saw Flemington. But it was the Flemington saleyards. Sydney, and not the Flemington racecourse, Melbourne. The passengers treated the mistake as a joke on themselves and spent the day sight-seeing, Victoria’s AgentGeneral in London (Sir Louis Bassau). who is home on business, was one of the passengers. “I feel like giving that shunter a fiver,” he said. "I was able to spend ihe day with my sister, whom I hadn’t seen for five years.”