Wrong place at the wrong time - Tangiwai disaster

For New Zealand, 1953 had been a year of significant milestones. In May, Edmund Hillary had scaled the heights of Mt Everest. On 23 December the country could barely control its excitement at the arrival of the beautiful young Queen Elizabeth II and her dashing husband, Prince Philip. All of this changed on Christmas Day, when Prime Minister Sidney Holland announced with ‘profound regret’ news of the accident in a radio broadcast from the military camp at Waiouru. With no newspapers produced on Christmas Day, this was the first many New Zealanders had heard of the tragic events of the previous evening.

The weather on Christmas Eve was fine and there had been little rain. There was no indication that the Whangaehu River would be in flood. A goods train had crossed the bridge around 7 p.m. and the river had appeared normal. What transformed this situation was the sudden release of approximately two million cubic metres of water from the crater lake of nearby Mt Ruapehu. This lahar produced a 6-metre-high wave of water, ice, mud and rocks, which surged, tsunami-like, down the Whangaehu River. Sometime between 10.10 and 10.15 p.m. it struck the concrete pylons of the Tangiwai railway bridge.

Travelling at approximately 65 kilometres per hour, locomotive Ka 949 and its train of nine carriages and two vans reached the severely weakened bridge at 10.21 p.m. As the bridge buckled beneath its weight, the engine plunged into the river, taking all five second-class carriages with it. The force of the torrent destroyed four of these carriages with little chance of survival for those inside.

The leading first-class carriage, Car Z, teetered on the edge of the ruined bridge before it broke free from the remaining three carriages and fell into the river. It rolled downstream before coming to rest on a bank as the water level receded. Remarkably 21 of the 22 passengers in this carriage survived. Evidence suggested that the locomotive driver had applied the emergency brakes some 200 metres from the bridge, thus preventing the last three carriages from toppling into the river. This action saved many lives.