Wednesday marks 40 years since a Sydney train derailed in a deadly accident that horrified Australia. It left enduring lessons, writes Jamie Duncan.
Australia's worst rail disaster took only seconds to happen but was a decade or more in the making.
The Granville train crash on January 18, 1977, claimed 83 lives and injured 213 others.
Granville revealed gross inadequacies in New South Wales (NSW) railway maintenance and taught the emergency services a lesson about the welfare of workers like those who raced against time to free survivors on that hot January day.
How it unfolded
The 06:09 train from Mount Victoria, in the Blue Mountains, to Sydney had at least 469 passengers aboard by the time it left Parramatta station in the city's west.
At 08:10, its electric locomotive derailed on an 80km/h (50 mph) curve in a deep cutting at Granville and speared into the supports of the Bold Street bridge above the tracks.
The locomotive tipped on its side and dragged the first two carriages off the rails.
Eight people were killed in carriage one, which tore open as it hit a power stanchion. Everyone survived in the second carriage.
The bridge, with four cars on its deck, teetered for a few seconds, then rained at least 470 tonnes of concrete and steel on carriages three and four.
The weight crushed the roof of the wooden-framed carriages to within 60cm (24 inches) or less of the floor. Some areas were crushed to floor level.
Within minutes, a vast rescue assembled - police, firefighters, ambulance crews, doctors, nurses, engineers, railway workers among them.
The cutting hindered initial access until ladders, then stairs, could be erected.
The accident drew civilian volunteers, some just teenagers, to lend a hand but many ghoulish sightseers turned up.
Police forced to control crowd
By 08:50, 1500 people lined the cutting. The crowd spilled onto the tracks. Some disguised themselves as rescue workers and climbed onto the unstable bridge wreckage for a closer look, risking the lives of trapped passengers and their rescuers beneath.
