The Ghost Train and the Scarlet Moon by Jack Roney

Author:Jack Roney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ghost train, scarlet moon, jack roney, the ghost train and the scarlet moon, brisbane fiction
Publisher: Hawkeye Publishing Pty Ltd
Published: 2022-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

17

IF I was going to find answers, I would have to do it on my own. I needed a better appreciation of the scene of the Camp Mountain train crash. I flopped down on my beanbag and fired up my laptop. I discovered a news archive website and entered search criteria until I found a scanned image of the front page of the Courier Mail, 6th May 1947.

The headline read, “PICNIC TRAIN SMASH KILLS 15. RESCUERS WORK INTO THE NIGHT: NARROW ESCAPES”. In a grainy black and white photo, white-capped ambulance officers were sponging the foreheads and bringing cups of water to the lips of trapped passengers. A woman was pinned by her legs, her anguished face sooted with coal dust. Nearby were glimpses of other men and women, a face here, an arm there. A trapped woman clung with both hands around the upper arm of an ambulance officer. Almost indistinguishable among the carnage, lay the body of a small boy. His left hand was extended, his face turned away, as if he had just put his head down to sleep. The caption below the photo read, “Three dead and three living were trapped together in this section of a wrecked coach”.

The article described how rescuers, with the aid of portable generators, had worked feverishly to cut away a section of a carriage to extricate the body of a young girl. It took more than nine hours to recover all the bodies. The last one was removed at 7:15pm after an elbow was seen jammed between the tender and the broken edge of the second carriage. Lower down on the front page, a detailed timeline of the unfolding events was given. The names of the fifteen dead and thirty injured were listed. I recalled reading that the driver had been pulled free from the wreck by rope, after being trapped for five hours. He died suddenly the following afternoon in hospital despite showing signs of recovery. He was the sixteenth victim.

Beside the main article was a rudimentary map of the crash site and another article titled, “VIGIL BY RELATIVES AT HOSPITAL WARD”. For hours, relatives of people who had set out on the trip pressed forward, trying to identify the injured as they arrived at the General Hospital. I clicked the top tab to scroll through the newspaper pages. The entire page three was full of images of the crash. The main image was a broader perspective of the crash site showing the overturned locomotive surrounded by twisted metal and shattered carriages. Labels had been added to the image to identify the location of the wrecked bogies, engine, tender, first carriage roof and third carriage. Rescuers stood on and around the wreck in a futile attempt to rescue people trapped below. The image to the right captured the dramatic rescue of the driver as he was pulled free.

Another photo showed a woman, with black hands and coal dusted face, being handed a tin cup of tea. She had been trapped for six hours.

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