A shared journey into tragedy

IT was such an ordinary day. At their farm, Forest View, on the outskirts of Kerang, Alan Peacock was sitting at the kitchen table looking at some bills and having a cup of tea, while his wife, Min, a nurse, was hanging the washing outside. It had been, Alan says, "a very casual morning".

IT was such an ordinary day. At their farm, Forest View, on the outskirts of Kerang, Alan Peacock was sitting at the kitchen table looking at some bills and having a cup of tea, while his wife, Min, a nurse, was hanging the washing outside. It had been, Alan says, "a very casual morning".

From the train tracks that run up the edge of their farm, they heard the driver of the 1pm Tuesday train from Swan Hill sound the horn, as he always did, before the crossing. And then "an almighty explosion".

Within a few minutes they were on the scene of one of the nation's worst rail disasters.

It was chaos. By the time they arrived, Brian Frichot, a labourer who was in a car close enough to see the accident, was cradling truck driver Christiaan Scholl, 44, whose face was covered in blood.

Scholl, who has been charged with culpable driving, was inconsolable, says Min Peacock.

He was saying "Oh God, no, oh God, no", she says.

Survivors emerged from the wreckage: "I just want to be left alone," a German woman on her way to Melbourne said.

Two conductors, Jodie and Hayden, were helping passengers. They told Min she shouldn't look in the second carriage, Carriage B. She said she was a nurse and might be able to help.

Peering in through the torn-away side, she could see to her left that metal and seats and passengers had been crushed together like the bellows of a concertina.

"There were bodies everywhere," she says. "It was like an explosion, people and personal belongings strewn everywhere ... glass and blood and dust."

At the edge of the carriage, a man lay on his back, with severe head injuries. He looked to be Asian, she thought. "His pulse was so weak ... and just getting weaker and weaker."

Alongside him, was the body of a teenage boy, lying face down.

Min noticed he had colour tips in his hair "the way the fashion is these days".

On the far side of the carriage, a girl, Sharise McMonnie, 15, had her head in the lap of a 49-year-old woman called Vicky who was sitting opposite. The girl's face was lacerated, her leg trapped and broken. She was screaming "My leg, my leg", Min says. Somewhere in the wreckage Sharise's father and sister were dead.

To the right, a man was also trapped. "It looked as though he was kneeling down, but in fact his legs were caught and twisted in the framework. You could see the upper torso of him and his head and he was just rocking," Min says.

Of the 11 people who died, eight were in Carriage B -- BRN20 -- and one in Carriage C -- BRN19. One man, say the Peacocks, was carried from the wreckage on a stretcher before dying by the road.

An elderly man died in hospital in Melbourne.

At the scene, farmers joined ambulance officers and police.

Wade Gillingham arrived in his ute and ferried survivors across the mud and saltbush to an ambulance.

The Swan Hill to Melbourne V-Line train was just 40 minutes into its four-hour journey and not far from its first stop at Kerang.

It was an N-set carriage -- five seats across, three on one side, two on the other, passengers facing one another if they wanted to, big windows, a baggage rack above their heads, a buffet up the front end offering "Travellers' Choice" hot food, or sandwiches, beer, wine, coffee.

Among the passengers who boarded at Swan Hill, on the Murray River, was Stephanie Meredith and her daughters Danielle, 8, and Chantal, 6, on their way home to Melbourne, after celebrating her 46th birthday with her parents in Balranald.

Matthew Stubbs, 13, was off to see his mother in Wodonga. He had told friends at Swan Hill Secondary School that she was moving to Queensland and he would probably go and live with her. His father, Brett, had intended to put him on the bus the next day, but the boy was missing his mum and it was just "easier to catch the train".

Mr Stubbs hugged his son and told him he loved him. As Matthew got on to the train, a man, later identified as Geoff McMonnies, helped with his luggage.

Mr McMonnies, 50, and his daughters Sharise, 15, and Rosanne, 17, had started their journey two hours earlier, boarding a Mildura to Swan Hill V-Line bus at Robinvale. He was taking the girls to Hamilton Island for a holiday. In the train, they sat opposite Matthew Stubbs.

Great-grandmother Margaret Wishart, 78, had dialysis in Swan Hill that morning and was heading home to Kerang. It was a journey she often made. Not so for Nicholas Parker, a 32-year-old Kiwi in Victoria to celebrate the engagement of his sister Kirsten.

Parker's cousin drove him to the train from Mildura, arriving at the station just in time. "He only got there by 30 seconds," said a relative. "They laughed all the way to Swan Hill."

Also boarding the train was Jean Webb, 79, who was on her way to see her daughter in Echuca.

Lindsay Webb had driven his wife to the station and saw her step into Carriage B -- the economy-class buffet carriage.

"Everybody will be talking about Jean for 100 years to come ... she was just so involved with so many people," Lyn Wilson said later. "I just can't imagine Swan Hill without Jean."

Old and young, starting out on journeys or going home. Some saw the truck and braced for the impact. Others only heard the crash. Among the luckiest was Andrew Bruton, who, like Stephanie Meredith, grew up in Balranald. He was returning to work, near Port Hedland, where he drives trucks in the mines.

Bruton, who survived a cyclone earlier this year, was sitting two rows behind the Merediths, but got up moments before the crash to get a cup of coffee. "God was with him," his grandmother, Eileen, said yesterday.

Locals later spoke of the many close shaves at the level crossing.

"Something has been going to happen for as long as I've been around," said Des Gillingham.

The day after, Min Peacock took her dogs and went rabbiting in the forest, trying to clear her head. As she walked, she felt something in her boots.

It was pieces of glass.

Additional reporting: Natasha Robinson