Underbelly 2 by John Silvester

Author:John Silvester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2012-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Blood on the tracks

Australia’s worst train disaster

Not all the scars from Granville are physical

GARY James Case, taxi driver, is looking out the window of his flat in Bridge Street, Granville, when he sees the Blue Mountains express on the railway line below. He hears what he describes later as ‘two metallic noises’ as it approaches the overhead bridge spanning the line. The big locomotive spears off the rails, veers, then tips and skids, dragging the first carriage with it. It has hit the iron stanchion supporting the bridge. Ten seconds later there is a massive ‘whoomph’ The bridge has fallen on two carriages. It sounds like a bomb, and is just as deadly. A man calls out ‘Trust in God, Christ will save you.’ Another is heard giving himself the last rites. It is 8.12am, 18 January 1977.

SHE was nineteen, crushed beneath steel girders and three hundred tonnes of concrete and surrounded by the dead and the dying. Yet she found strength to ask questions that made the policeman want to cry.

Instead, he lied. Fiercely – as if someone’s life depended on it. Which, in a way, the girl’s did. He had already saved her once, after crawling through the tiny, suffocating space in the rubble between the bodies, fearing that the concrete slab a few centimetres above his skull could drop at any moment, killing him and anyone else still alive. When he’d found her, seen that her face was turning blue, he risked moving her injured head to let her breathe, and prayed it wouldn’t harm her spine. She started breathing, but her legs were pulped, her pelvis smashed and she was bleeding so much it seemed she would soon be just another body among many.

But she wouldn’t give in. First she asked him if she would live. Yes, he said. Then she asked if she’d be able to walk again. Again, the rescue policeman didn’t hesitate. Then she asked him a question that still touches him more than all the awful things he’s seen. ‘Will I ever be able to have a baby?’ she whispered.

There was a pause, broken by the moans of the injured and the dying entombed in the crushed railway carriage. ‘Yeah,’ he said gently. ‘God can do miracles.’

He said it but he didn’t believe it, then. Even when, hours later, they finally inched Debbie Skow’s broken body on to a stretcher and out of the horror and into hospital, Constable Gary Raymond thought the brave girl would die.

But he was wrong. Debbie Skow was in a coma for sixty-five days, and endured dozens of operations, but she lived. She eventually walked a little, despite losing a leg. She married. And, many years later, after adopting a daughter because she thought she would never conceive, Debbie had a baby. A miracle, just as he’d said.

There were other miracles at Granville on that summer morning more than twenty years ago, the day Australia’s worst train disaster killed eighty-three people on their way to work in Sydney.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.