The decision that sealed train boy's fate

A FATHER sits on a step in the morning sun, his head in his hands. His teenage son is dead. His heart is cracked open. Video: Survivor recounts the crash Video: Emergency services respond Video: Kerang crash – extended report Interactive map: Where the crash happened Graphic: Crash site | Pictures: The scene Your say: An unsafe system?

A FATHER sits on a step in the morning sun, his head in his hands. His teenage son is dead. His heart is cracked open. Video: Survivor recounts the crash Video: Emergency services respond Video: Kerang crash – extended report Interactive map: Where the crash happened Graphic: Crash site | Pictures: The scene Your say: An unsafe system?

He goes through all the little decisions that have brought him to this dark place. Deciding to put the boy on a country train on Tuesday instead of a bus on Wednesday so he could get to see his mother a day earlier. Little decisions. "He was a good lad," Brett says of his son, who loved football. Little decisions.

This is Kerang, in northern Victoria, the morning after one of the nation's worst rail disasters. Six kilometres out of town, a thick fog blankets the wreckage of a train and the truck that collided with it, ripping open the side of one carriage and derailing another, killing 11 people.

With first light, forensic police from the Disaster Victim Identification Unit and the Major Collision Investigation Unit and members of the State Emergency Service move in to begin the grim task of identifying and removing the dead and cutting away the shredded metal.

They will do it all day long, with painstaking precision and as much dignity as they can manage. "The process itself is quite a lengthy, slow process because we want to do it right the first time," DVI acting inspector Steve Deveson says. "We want to make sure all the victims are returned to their families, and it's a slow process.

"We want to make sure all the victims are identified, and that their loved ones get the right person back."

Asked how bad the scene on board the train is, he nods and says: "It's pretty horrific."

Most of the victims were in Carriage B, the second carriage from the engine. Carriage A, first-class, was undamaged. Carriage B had a buffet at the front and seating at the rear. Eight died in that carriage. One person died in Carriage C. Another person staggered out of the wreckage and died by the road.

Throughout the day, the stories of the journeys of the victims and the survivors begin to be told. How Geoff McMonnies and his daughters Rose, 17, and Sharise, 15, were on their way to Hamilton Island for a holiday. Geoff and Rose were among the dead, Sharise among the survivors.

How Jean Webb, 79, who was killed, was on her way to see her daughter. How Matthew Stubbs, 13, who was killed, was on his way to see his mum. Journeys and little decisions.

During the day, Matthew's father and his mother will be among family members who are taken to the scene by police. His mother will take only a few steps towards the track before stopping. "No, that's enough."

"It's horrible," says Matthew's sister Bec Barry. Her little brother was heading to Wodonga. "He was at his dad's house and he was going to see his mum in Wodonga," she says. "He just moved up there and he missed his mum".

Matthew's sister, 15, is devastated. "They were like twins."

The families arrive at the scene just before 2pm - almost exactly 24 hours after truck driver Chris "Dutchy" Scholl crashed with the V-Line train from Swan Hill to Melbourne.

Scholl was on his weekly run from Wangaratta to Adelaide. Skid marks suggest he hit his brakes hard about 50m from the tracks, where the crossing lights were flashing, before steering to the left, too late to stop the truck ripping the side out of the train. Scholl is being consoled by family in a Melbourne hospital. The experienced truckie, who doesn't smoke or drink, may be charged.

Back in Kerang, about 18 members of two families arrived yesterday. They step out of a minibus, and stay close together, staring across a paddock at the smashed train, crying. Some slowly walk to the site. They look at the truck and the flashing lights. A young woman collapses by the road, and sits looking at the train. A man, on his haunches alongside her, eyes down, watches over her. After almost an hour, they leave silently.

Rob Barnett, chief executive of V-Line speaks of sadness and sympathy, adding "no silver bullets" could prevent such accidents.

He says country trains are often full of the elderly ("nans and pops") and the young - rural people who would introduce themselves on a long journey.

In Kerang, a farming community, many know the emergency workers. They understand that gaps in the conversations with them mean that what they saw wasn't good.

Some doctors say they could have been used better, done more. Victorian Transport Minister Lynne Kosky says emergency workers were extraordinary.

Late in the day, the last of the bodies is removed and police allow the wreckage to be viewed. The smell of diesel is strong. Railway sleepers are splintered underneath. Metal is twisted and torn. Little decisions.