Granville train disaster: Taking the train 40 years after fatal crash
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Forty years after the Granville train disaster, I caught the train from the Blue Mountains, underneath the Granville Bridge, and all the way to Central Station — what would have been the final destination were it not for the crash that killed 83 people.
In 1977, they were catching the train to go to work, or to visit the city with their grandchildren, or meet with family and friends.
In 2017, they were travelling for similar reasons, but many with the knowledge of the accident, or with memories of the more recent 1999 Glenbrook accident where a train collision resulted in seven deaths.
The train, in those days, started at Mount Victoria so that's where I hopped on at 6:07am, as close as possible to the 1977 6:09am scheduled departure.
Mount Victoria is a very quiet village in the western part of the mountains and the dawn had just broken when I arrived.
It's here that I meet Fred Smith, 61, on the platform just before boarding.
Fred is a solicitor who had already driven for nearly two hours from Mudgee and was travelling by train from Mount Victoria to attend court in the city.
He remembered the anniversary was today.
"I don't think anybody could have been alive at the time and not remember it," he said.
"I just get on the train and go to sleep, it makes you wonder how many people were doing the same thing 40 years ago
The train pulls into the station, we hop on into one of the quiet carriages and I meet Ellen McCabe, 51, who commutes to work every day from Mt Victoria right into the city.
It's a long journey to take twice a day, and she passes the time by putting her makeup on, reading and watching shows on her phone.
Ellen was a child in New Zealand when it happened, so she didn't know much about it until she moved to the mountains.
She remembers it because it is the same day as her niece's birthday.
Bob Coyne, 61, gets on at Blackheath, commuting to the city for work, as he has done for 16 years.
"I was thinking about it this morning actually," Bob said.
He had started a long career with BP just a few days before the accident and heard about it on the transistor radio.
"This is the actual train itself, and this is the carriage as well," Bob told me. "You're in the right spot ... it's got some significance."
"My wife had a boyfriend at the time ... who was killed on the train."
Bob and his now wife celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary last week.
Next I meet Heidi Grimson, 53, and Kate Grimson, 19, from Bundaberg, Queensland, who were in the Blue Mountains for a relative's funeral.
Heidi was living Sydney and at home from school that day where she watched the broadcast.
"It was really intense … it was pretty upsetting being a child and watching that," she said.
At this point I am scolded for talking in the quiet carriage, so I switch at the next stop, about a third of the way through the journey.
Daniel Baranowski, 39, commutes from Springwood to Penrith for work and had heard about the disaster — "it was a mountains train and it hit the bridge" — but certainly doesn't think about it a lot.
At least, not compared to the 1999 Glenbrook rail accident.
"It was more recent than that and I go through there all the time," Daniel said.
"Car accidents happen all the time and you don't think about them all the time when you're in a car right — it doesn't work."
More and more people are filing on the train as we get to Penrith.
It's louder in this carriage. One woman argues with her son on the phone and young people share headphones on a mobile.
I catch another commuter, Lida Szabunia, who travels every day from Leura.
Lida reads, meditates and listens to music on her trips but today she was trying to do work before I interrupted.
She was not living in the mountains when the disaster happened, but her husband was.
"He had to take relatives ... down to view the relatives of remains of their loved ones," Lida said.
"It had a dramatic effect on the [Blue] Mountains community ... the mountains people talk about it, where they would sit in the train.
"I was around when that other train disaster happened in Glenbrook and knew someone who was actually killed on that train too."
Lida's final thoughts before she hops off the train for work are philosophical.
"You never know when your number is going to be up, you just have to appreciate life each day that you have, because you never know," she said.
The train has filled up dramatically since Mount Victoria.
As we near Parramatta, more tracks start to run alongside our trains tracks, and it's heating up.
After Parramatta, the train slides under the Granville bridge just before 8:00am — the carriage is nearly silent, but I can't tell if it's any more silent than it would be on normal day.
We stop at Strathfield, which is where the 1977 train was heading but never reached, and pull into Central right on time.
Topics: community-and-society, emergency-incidents, disasters-and-accidents, granville-2142, nsw, sydney-2000
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