RAILWAY SMASH.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 224, 21 September 1928, Page 7

RAILWAY SMASH.

TRUNK LINE BLOCKED.

MIXED TRAIN DERAILED AT

PALMERSTON.

PASSENGERS NOT INJURED.

(By Telegraph.—Press Association.)

PALMERSTON N., tlxis day.

Serious dislocation of the Main Trunk railway service has been caused through the derailment of 17 wagons attached to a mixed train which left Wanganui at 1.12 p.m. yesterday, and was due at Palmerston North at 7.57 p.m. The passengers were unhurt. The cause of the accident has not been i definitely ascertained. A truck left the line for an unknown reason, and after going some distance struck the points of a siding. Thereafter the rails spread and 20 or 22 trucks were derailed. The permanent way was very badly damaged, sleepers being torn into fragments and rails wrenched out of alignment. The passengers felt a bumping, evidently the result of a wagon axle breaking and causing the vehicle to jump the rails. About 20 chains further on, past Boundary Road, the train passed a siding, at which a rake of three trucks, loaded with cement pipes, was standing. The derailed wagon caught these and dragged them along, capsizing them, and these in turn caused the derailment of the rest of the train. The breaking of the couplings brought the Westinghouse brake immediately into action, and this saved the rear portion of the train, including the two passenger coaches, from being involved in the general upheaval. Postal hampers of English mail for Wellington and South Island hampers, together with general merchandise, ineluding a consignment of flour, were s<Jattered in all directions.