TERRIFYING CRASH IN DARKNESS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXI, 28 March 1938, Page 8

TERRIFYING CRASH IN DARKNESS

DERAILMENT OVER IN A FLASH CHAOTIC MASS OF TWISTED WRECKAGE <Bv Telegraph—Press Association) WANGANUI, 26th March. As already stated six people are deu and I 3 are in the Wanganui Public Hospital as the result of injuries suffered when an excursion train carrying 198 passengers from Wellington to New Plymouth plunged off the rails and was wrecked in a cutting on a bend 19 miles from Wanganui at 2.18 o'clock this morning. The crash came terrifyingly in the darkness, when most of the passengers were dozing, but there w’as no panic, and those who were able helped in the rescue work. The derailment was over in a flash. One minute the passengers were sleeping, reading, laughing or talking, the next they were hurled in confusion across splintering carriages. The accident happened on a fairly sharp six-chain curve, enclosed by a 12ft high cutting, just after the long straight past Ratana. Almost on the beginning of the bend is a large weather-beaten sign, indicating a 20 miles an hocir speed restriction. In the opinion of the guard and passengers the train was not travelling at an excessive speed. Daylight revealed a chaotic mass of twisted metal, splintered woodwork and ominously stained cushions and seats. With their sides ripped out, their windows shattered and their seats and fittings splintered and crushed, the wrecked carriages bore mute yet fearful testimony to the ordeal through which the passengers had passed. It was difficult to realise that more had not met their death in the tangled wreckage.

The engine had apparently just begun to negotiate the curve when it left the rails and ploughed into the left-hand bank, dragging the following carriage over with it. The coupling between this carriage and the next was severed like a piece of wire, and the following three carriages swung off to the right at an angle and careered on parallel to the engine. As they passed they rebounded heavily off the engine, the impact slicing off large sections of the side structure and hurling the vehicles against the opposite bank.

An hour after leaving Rongotai aerodrome, the Wellington Aero Club's Waco plane, piloted by Flight Lieutenant J. Walker, flew over the scene of the train wreck about half a mile north of Ratana. The permanent way gleamed in thin ribbons 1000 feet below the plane, and small

puffs of white smoke from the engine of the relief train were the first sign of the location of the smash. Then the derailed engine and the four carriages could be made out sprawled on either side of the track in a shallow cutting.

Seen from the ground, the engine, its metal buckled and crushed, lay deeply embedded in the left-hand side of the bank, while, thrust fast against the tender, was the first carriage. Three more carriages, all connected, lay on their sides parallel with the engine on the opposite side of the cutting. Both sets of vehicles were lying at angles of about 45 degrees, forming a huge V. The second, third and fourth carriages, which parted from the engine and ploughed along the bank parallel, were badly smashed. The left-hand sides of the front compartments of both the second and third cars were completely shorn away, exposing a tangled mass of seats and fittings. The final carriage received the most damage; it was wedged firmly against the car still connected with the engine—the bottom corner of which protruded half-way inside it.

It was in these last three carriages that the most serious casualties occurred. The first detached carriage received the full force of the collision with the engine, and four passengers in the front compartments were killed instantly by shocking injuries. Small articles in the wreckage presented as telling evidence of the disaster as the destruction of the carriages. Personal belongings, bereft of their associations, bore mute testimony of happiness interrupted by tragedy. A novelette, with a page turned town to mark the place, lay next to a pile of splintered seats. Odd shoes, a pair of trampled spectacle lenses, bags of sweets and many other trivial traces of the interrupted journey were strewn among the main wreckage.