Trains Collide In Snowstorm

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 67, 11 December 1937, Page 5

Trains Collide In Snowstorm

-Press 'Assn.

SCOTTISH TRAGEDY Rescuers Hampered By Cold and Steam DEATH-ROLL GROWS

(By Telezraph-

— CouyrightA

(Eeceived 11, 2.0 p.m.) / LONDON, Dec. 10}. Twenty-eight persons were killed and forty injured wihen an Edin-burgh-Glasgow express, speeding at sixty miles an hour throngh a raging blizzard, crashed into a stationary Dundee-Glasgow train at Castlecary, a village 13 miles from Glasgow. Rescuers, struggling in deep snow and inky darkness, wert forced to huild honfires from th* wreckage of coaches hefore they could find the dead and injured, who were dragged through tht blinding snowstorm and laid out in a goods shed. Two carriages were thrown right over the englne and one landed on top of it. Others were telescoped and smashed to matchwood. Hissing jets of steam from the upturned locoino /e, combined with the blizzard, added to the frightfulness of the accident. Jets of steam penetrated the wreckage and passengers could be heard screaming from the torture ~>f. the hot steam. An uninjured passenger said afc first that it was impossible to penetrate the twisted wreckage, owing to the snow, steam, and darkness. Cries from women and children were unanswered until half an hour after the crash, when piles of broken coachwood were set on fire. Slowly parties of rescuers, with their hands almost frozen, dragged out the dead and injured. Bonfires began to shed. a lurid glare over the bodies huddled ^longside the tracks, with snow covefing them in a white pall. Ambulances ^dashed from Glasgow, Falkirk and even Edinburgh, skidding crazily over the ice-covered roads. Doctors and nurses from all nearhy hospitals stood by to treat the injured, who, covered with blood and snow, were lifted into ambulances by villagers and uninjured passengers. The condition of several of the injured is very grave. The fireman was killed but the driver had a remarkable escape, being hurled from the cahin. After recovering from the shock, he risked scalds and cllmbed through tho ^wreckage to cut off the steam. Gordon Dickson, of Edinburgh, told a most amaziuj story: "I was/ y in a compartment in which there were four others. I knew nothing until I awolce lying on snow several yards from the wrecked oarriage. .1 had been hurled through the window uninjured. My four companions were all killed. I helped in the rescue work. The first person 1 dragged out was au/elderly woman, burned in the wreckage. I was staggered to find it was my mother, who was travelling unknown to me. She -was miraeulously uninjured.''