Rakaia smash

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32880, 1 April 1972, Page 12

Rakaia smash

Mr E. R. J. Stonehouse, Gordon Avenue, questions the accuracy of newspaper reports on the fate of the horse-box and those in it in the Rakaia train collision of 1907. His father who was acting as the colonel’s groom, was in the box with two horses. He told his sons that he went on to Sheffield in considerable pain but was sent from there to the Timaru Hospital, travelling on straw. He had a crushed kidney removed and spent the next eighteen months on crutches. He suffered occasional pain until he died at the age of 77. Mr Z. Sherratt, of Geraldine, with whose father Mr Stonehouse was convalescent, confirms this. It is strange that the reports named civilians with minor injuries but ignored a soldier who was seriously hurt. Perhaps Mr Stonehouse dismissed his injury as not serious. Mr W. G. Stonehouse, Rockinghorse Road, has sent an interesting postcard with a view, taken from the roof of the locomotive cab, of the soldiers’ train, showing the workmen and spectators and one of the “twenty or thirty" trips which arrived during the day. On the basis of the large gap between the shadows cast by the two engines, it appears most unlikely that they were in con- - tact after the smash, as he suggests. Mr Bert Williams, Ashgrove Terrace, counts himself as one of the lucky ones in the Bankside accident; he wasn’t on board but had received, and declined, an unofficial and illegal invitation to travel on the footplate. He adds that, whatever was stated in court, the train did stop for some time at Bankside but then, in the belief that “troop trains are always late” it was decided to push on to Rakaia.