GOODS TRAIN DERAILED

Waipa Post, Volume 32, Issue 1789, 31 July 1926, Page 5

GOODS TRAIN DERAILED

ONE OF BIGGEST IN DOMINION,

(By Telegraph. Press Association.) AUCKLAND, Friday.

A most sensational and one of the most seriouls goods train disasters in the history- of the New Zealand railways occurred at the Pokeno station last-night • about 11 o’clock, when 17 waggons on a train bound from Auck land to Taumarumii were' derailed, 16 of them telescoped and piled up on one another, forming a huge mass of wreckage of shattered waggons and merchandise. It i's assumed, that one waggon, a V.B. (insulated , waggon), the twenty-seventh from the. engine, jumped the rails about a mile from the station, ran along on the sleepers still coupledl with the other waggons till the station was passed, eventually hitting the frog in the line, and derailing the 16 waggon/s behind. The VJB. went on for another fifty yards before it broke loose from the twenty-six in front, and was then hurled to the embankment on the side of ithe line. A gang of men worked from midnight, ancl an emergency loop was completed in time to allow the /Main Trunk expresses to pass. Nobody was injured, and the men in the engine did not know what had occurred till they walked back to the wreckage.