Holiday trip turns into horror ride
The Queen of the Sea, swept from its tracks by the tsunami.
Named with grim irony Samudradevi, or Queen of the Sea, the train that left Colombo Fort station shortly after 9am on Sunday for its regular run to the southern city of Galle was full, even by Sri Lankan standards.
As many as 1700 passengers crammed its carriages or hung from the sides. It was a holiday weekend as well as a full-moon day when Buddhists offer special monthly prayers and people visit relatives.
For most of its length the railway runs close to Sri Lanka's west coast, sometimes within sight of the beach. At Telwatta, the track cuts through thick palm groves and the sea, 200 metres away, is barely visible.
Without warning, two hours after leaving Colombo, most of the train's hot and swaying throng were dead. A giant wave roared through the trees and threw the carriages off the rails, filling them instantly with water.
At the disaster scene, scores of troops were still lifting bodies out of the wreckage and the waterlogged chaos of fallen trees and ruined buildings that surrounded it. Working in teams of four, soldiers wearing black scarves over their noses and mouths against the stench carried corpses on stretchers to flat ground. At least 100 bodies could be seen.
Most of the windows in the two nearest carriages, which were lying on their sides, were open, but one had its glass broken, perhaps a sign that desperate passengers had smashed it in an effort to escape.
They had little chance. The wall of water must have been at least six metres high, to judge from missing or displaced tiles on the roofs of a large family house near the wrecked train.
The Queen of the Sea's fate qualifies as the world's worst rail accident, outstripping the death toll of about 800 who died when a cyclone blew a train off a bridge into the Bagmati River in Bihar, India, in 1981.
Scores of people in the community of Telwatta also drowned when the water destroyed their houses. It was hard to tell how many of the dead at the disaster scene were passengers. As the soldiers laid out more and more bodies, villagers stood silently watching in case relatives were found.
Hundreds of the dead were moved from the site on Monday to Batapola hospital, about 16 kilometres away. There the spectacle was repeated yesterday, with rows of corpses lying in the building's grassy forecourt.
"Nearly 700 bodies have been released to relatives already, but we still have 400 here," said J. M. Jayatilake, the doctor in charge.
The exact number of passengers on the train is unclear. Dr Jayatilake said police believed there were 1700. This was based, they said, on Colombo Fort station's record of 1500 ticket sales for Galle, plus about 200 who, as usual, get on the train at various stops without tickets.
"Only a few people escaped alive, between 10 and 20," Dr Jayatilake said. A team was photographing and finger-printing bodies at Batapola hospital so records would be available for relatives.