Tracks of our tears:
memories of Granville, 40 years on
As she waved off her excited daughters, Helen and Rosie, on that fiercely hot January morning, the then 34-year-old Wendy Ward had no idea that it would be the last time she’d ever see her pretty blonde eldest girls alive. Elizabeth, known by her middle name Helen, 11, and Rosie, eight, perished in the Granville train disaster. The girls were found by rescuers being protectively sheltered by their grandad, Walter “Vic” Miles, and their stepgrandmother, Marjory “Madge” Miles. Wendy’s life and those of countless others were irrevocably altered at 8.10am on January 18, 1977, when a train from the Blue Mountains to Sydney’s Central Station derailed and was then crushed by Granville’s collapsing Bold Street Bridge.
“People say to me, ‘What’s it like, living with Granville?’” says 74-year -old Wendy Miles (as she’s now known). “How can you explain losing four members of your family? I eventually started saying, ‘Just imagine you’ve lost a leg. You’ll never, ever get the real thing back. Now, imagine that, but far worse.’ It’s been a torment.”
These days, British-born Wendy lives alone in the gentle climes of Kingston, Tasmania. She is divorced from Ken Ward, the father of her four children, and while life has gone on, it hasn’t been easy. She’s battled breast cancer twice and been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She directly attributes her first cancer diagnosis in part to the anguish and stress caused by the disaster. “Granville has tainted everything,” she says. “I think the stress of having to keep myself together and keep doing what the world expected of me – regardless of how I felt – undoubtedly affected my health.”
After the disaster – few associated with Granville will ever refer to it as an accident – Wendy carried on for the sake of her surviving children. Her third daughter, Janet, was then six and today lives close to Wendy in Hobart. Her son, David, was almost five. Wendy’s rightly proud of the fact that, despite her overwhelming grief, in the subsequent years, she managed to put herself through TAFE to get her Higher School Certificate, then uni for a degree in psychology and philosophy. “I was born during the Second World War,” says Wendy today. “I grew up gritting my teeth and just getting on with things. There was no such thing as ‘counselling’.”
Even so, six months after the disaster, the realisation struck her that she’d lost her dad and step-mum, too. “I’d been so wrapped up in losing the girls, I didn’t have space to grieve for my dad, Vic, and Madge until later,” she recalls. “I also agonised for years over whether to say I had four children if I was asked – or two. That’s still hard sometimes.”
Wendy’s youngest surviving child, David, is now 44. He says Granville has had a profound effect.
“For most of my life, people said, ‘You must have been too young to understand’, but that infuriates me because it’s like saying it didn’t affect me as much. I knew what was going on,” recalls the Canberra-based dad of two today. “I remember the morning itself like it was yesterday. I threw a hissy fit because my big sisters were going on an outing with Grandad and Madge, and I wasn’t. My next memory is coming down the hallway at home on the morning after and seeing Mum and Dad crying on the couch. I asked, ‘What’s wrong? It’s the girls isn’t it? They didn’t come home.’ Then Mum pulled me over for a cuddle.”
David says the disaster’s ripple effects are ongoing. “I’m pretty screwed up over it,” he admits. “I’ve suffered with depression and I always feel like I have to make everybody else happy and okay, or things are going to go really bad. For the longest time, I felt guilty that I wasn’t on the train instead of my sisters, or that I didn’t stop them from leaving the house.”
Few Australians alive at the time can forget the shock of the disaster. Just over two years after the devastation of Cyclone Tracy in 1974, the fact that Granville was preventable made the scale of the tragedy more painful.
The crowded eight-carriage 6.09am “red rattler” had departed Mount Victoria in the Blue Mountains and was almost at Granville station, in Sydney’s west, when locomotive 4620 derailed and toppled the first and second carriages at approximately 8.10am, hitting a row of supports holding up the Bold Street Bridge overhead. Seconds later, the compromised steel-and-concrete bridge, weighing an estimated 570 tonnes – and the cars on the bridge – came crashing down. The rear half of the third wooden carriage and the front half of the fourth were flattened. Ultimately, the catastrophe claimed 83 passengers and injured 213 others.
The initial judicial enquiry found the primary cause of the derailment was “the very unsatisfactory condition of the permanent way, being the poor fastening of the track, causing the track to spread and allowing the left front wheel of the locomotive to come off the rail.” That the bridge had had additional concrete added during construction to make its surface level with the road significantly increased its weight.
However, Barry Gobbe, now 70, who was one of the first ambulance officers on the scene, believes poor maintenance of the train’s wheels was also a significant cause. He’s documented the compelling evidence and his findings in his definitive book, Revisiting The Granville Train Disaster Of 1977.
“The frustration of the day stays with me,” he says. “Not being able to do anything for the two carriages of dead people I came across. It was so quiet, apart from the sound of splintering wood and the creaking of the settling bridge. That and the fact that I’ve since learned that not only was it the worst rail disaster in our history, it was also the worst preventable rail disaster. Even now, when I talk about it, I sometimes burst into tears.”
Granville has been with Tina Morgan, 54 – one of the youngest survivors – all her life, too. Aged
14 in 1977, Tina was visiting her grandmother in Penrith from the Gold Coast. She was due to travel home two days later.
On January 18, she was on her own in the third carriage, making her way to Sydney to meet her uncle for a day’s sightseeing. She never made the rendezvous. The crash left her with fractures, facial injuries, an impalement wound, lacerations and burns. She was pulled from the wreckage six hours after impact and spent two months in Royal North Shore Hospital recovering – a time that inspired her to pursue a career in nursing. “Forty years have gone by, but I still get flashbacks,” says the mum of two. “A few weeks ago, a tow truck slammed into the house behind me. The screech of the brakes and the crashing noises brought the memories
Even now when I talk about it, I sometimes burst into tears.
flooding back, so I had to ring another Granville survivor to discuss it.”
The recent Dreamworld tragedy triggered Tina’s anguish, too, and she says she can’t watch accidents or disasters, even fictional, on TV. “I also count train carriages – I never travel in the third one,” she admits. In an eerie thread that connects Tina to the Ward family, she noticed Helen and Rosie giggling and playing with a doll on the train. Tina struck up a conversation with the girls about their doll, their shared love of ponies and the then popular Bug Catcher toy as the red rattler clattered down the line. “I only found out 10 years ago, when I began researching the victims, that they’d died. I was gutted. I’d assumed they’d be alright. I’ll never forget them,” says Tina.
Frontline of a tragedy
Despite the horror of the day, the heroism of all involved, especially the first responders, is beyond dispute. Theatre sister Margaret Warby lives in Mittagong and is now 76, but she worked at Parramatta Hospital at the time. She featured in The Weekly’s 1977 coverage of the disaster. Margaret was dispatched to Granville when the news broke and spent hours clambering into the crushed carriages to tend to the injured and alleviate the trapped passengers’ suffering.
“All we could do was our best,” recalls Margaret today. The matter-offact nurse carried on in the profession until she was 71. “I don’t think you can go through anything like that and forget it,” she says. “I still meet people who’ll say, ‘Oh, you were at Granville.’ But it was my job to be there. I was a nurse and that’s what it was all about.”
Margaret may prefer to downplay her involvement with the rescue operation, but she was awarded the prestigious Queen’s Gallantry Medal after the disaster. The honour recognises those who perform exemplary acts of bravery whether as a civilian or member of the military. “I got the 11th one in the world,’ says Margaret. “But six years ago, my home was robbed and the medal was stolen. That annoyed me. I haven’t dwelt on it, though. ‘Get on with it,’ my father used to say – that’s what I’ve done.”
Day of the Roses
A small positive to come out of Granville is that many survivors and those involved are increasingly connecting today. Thanks to Facebook, there is now an active survivors support group online. Members meet for semi-regular lunches and there’s the always poignant Day of the Roses memorial ceremony on January 18, which is well-attended. The 40th anniversary ceremony in 2017 will be particularly sombre.
“For the first time, the relatives will be able to throw roses – donated each year by a local florist – directly onto the left-hand, Parramatta side of the track where the crash actually happened,” explains Barry Gobbe, who is closely involved in organising the family-focused ceremony. “That’s been especially important to some survivors and family members.” Another wrong is being righted, also. The 13 incorrectly spelt names on the granite memorial stone are being corrected with the assistance of NSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance’s office and Sydney Trains.
“Those spelling mistakes have been a source of upset for the families affected for years,” says Barry. “Correcting them won’t give them closure because I don’t believe there’s any such thing, but I hope it can help heal at least one of the wounds.”
Wendy Miles isn’t well enough to travel to Sydney for the memorial, but says she doesn’t only acknowledge the tragedy on January 18. “Every anniversary, every Christmas and every birthday that goes by is painful,” she says. Her four grandchildren, Ben, 20, Chris, 19, David’s sons, and Sophie, 26, and Kate, 11, Janet’s daughters, have been a source of comfort, but Wendy misses her dad, step-mum and especially her lost girls every day.
“I still dream about the girls, Rosie especially, I don’t know why,” says Wendy. “She was a lovely, sweet little thing and losing her was terrible, but I’ve always been very angry about losing Helen. She was only 11, but she was just starting to become a young lady – and my friend – and I was robbed of that. After 40 years, I’m still not at peace with it – and I know I never will be.”