Hyde railway disaster

This service left Cromwell at 9 am and reached Dunedin at 5:20 pm; in 1937, the schedule was accelerated by half an hour and it was this timetable that was in force on 4 June 1943.

The train was hauled by a steam locomotive, AB 782, and consisted of seven passenger carriages, a guard's van and two wagons of time-sensitive freight.

[2] 4 June was a Friday and was to be followed by the King's Birthday long weekend, which boosted patronage to 113 as many passengers travelled to the Winter Show in Dunedin or horse races in Wingatui.

[3][7] The force of the crash was such that the undercarriage of one was twisted into the form of a letter "S" and one passenger who survived was thrown out of their carriage, struck the side of the cutting, and bounced back in through another window.

Bits of the train were scattered throughout the surrounding farmland and the cutting contained a mass of splintered wood, bent steel, and broken seats; an attending doctor described it as resembling "the result of a bomb blast".

[10] Some passengers were trapped in the wreckage for several hours and medical personnel – with the assistance of railway maintenance staff – worked until it was too dark to see.

The disaster was the only significant accident involving passengers that occurred on the Otago Central Railway between the start of construction in 1877 and closure.