Rescuer s Awful Experience.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 376, 23 April 1908, Page 4

Rescuer s Awful Experience.

Recovers Hie SVlultilated Bodies of his two Sisters. When the Sunshine Fire Brigade turned out to extinguish the burning carriages the first man to reach the station was an auxiliary fireman named Laffan. He worked energetically to put out the flaming debris and when it was possible to remove the imprisoned passengers,amongst the first bodies recovered were those of two of his sisters, whose legs and arms had been cut off and were lying around.

In the wrecked carriage some people were found with the life crushed out of them, hanging from their chins from the hat rack against which they had been jambed when the Bendigo engine ploughed its way into the train. Dr. Vox, the first medical man to arrive on the scene, graphically described his inspection of the dead and wounded. While they were lying on Sunshine railway platform the spectable that met his eye was awful. There were telescoped carriages from which railway officials were extricating dead bodies and living. His attention was first called to a carriage in which an injured man was jambed between three partitions and a car that had been smashed together in concertina fashion. It was one of the most ghostly sights he had ever witnessed.

livery third or fourth person he came up to appeared to he dead. Amongst the first 60 he examined quite 15 or 20 were lifeless, and the bulk of the wounded were suffering from very serious injury, The dead in particular, appeared to have received shocking injuries, which must have killed them outright.