DUNEDIN, This Day.
The railway smash at Sawyer’s Bay turned out to be more serious than was at first reported. The train, which consisted of sixteen trucks and a large guard’s-van, was coming down the incline into Sawyer’s Bay when the engine —an Addington “U”— ran into a cow which had wandered on to the line just below the water tanks used by the engines, and on a curve a few feet above the lie that runs along the bay to Port Chalmers.
The morning was very dark. The cowcatcher bar first struck the cow and carried it along for a little distance, and then the engine, going over the animal and cutting it in two, left the line and ploughed its way along for some distance between the rails on the roadside. It came to a sudden stop by mounting the station platform and smashing into the front of the wooden structure.
It was fortunate that the engine took the course it did, for had it left the rails on the harbour side nothing could have prevented it from going right through the platform which runs along the sea shore and into the harbour. As it was, two of the trucks smashed through this platform and were piled up in the bay.
Altogether, six trucks were derailed, three of them being broken to pieces. The remaining trucks and the guard’s van did not leave the line. Two of the damaged trucks, which were doubledeckers, were full of sheep — over 200 in all — consigned to Wingatui from Tokarahi, on the Ngapara branch, and those were all killed. The engine lay on its side clear across the rails, with the front of it inside the railway station, the boarding of which was all carried away in front, and the tender lay right across the track, with trucks piled on top of it.
How Driver Symmonds and Fireman Dipps managed to escape instantaneous death is a miracle. Symmonds, as soon as the engine toppled over, fell out on to the line, and the fireman crawled out from under the fire-box, which rested on the platform, and thus saved himself from being crushed to death. Had the engine, instead of finding so convenient a resting-place, turned on its side on the line, Dipps would certainly have been killed outright. Both men picked themselves up without a scratch.
The rails were cut up and badly twisted. Tohill, a porter, who lives in a hut alongside the station, also had a very lucky escape. He was in his bed at the time when the engine shot past so close to his hut that it actually grazed it. The other four trucks which were knocked about and twisted into all sorts of shapes, contained potatoes, merchandise, and some cream separators.
Gangs of men and a crane were sent from town, and by noon a connecting line of rails was set down, thus enabling the express to proceed north.
Evening Post, Wellington, NZ, June 18, 1902