It was Christmas Eve, 1953 and a train was taking hundreds of weary, tired travellers dreaming of tinsel and fire from Wellington to Auckland where they would meet their loved ones and celebrate Christmas the next day.

It was a dark and foreboding night, as rain lashed the tracks and the train, it was almost impossible to see out through the streaming windows. People laughed nervously, wondering at the ferocity of the storm, for it was summer in New Zealand. The train barrelled throught the deepening dark, unconcerened, hooting it's defiance of nature at level crossings, it's bright lights spearing the sodden gloom before its path.

New Zealand is known as Aotearea - the land of the long white cloud.

It is also the land of the volcanoes, wherever you travel in Aotera you are constantly reminded of their rule by the undulating, almost feminine curve of the landscape. Most are dormant testaments of a younger and more violent past, but deep within the belly of Aotera, a fire still rumbles.

Approaching Taihapei, the passengers aboard the sat back and awaited the end of their journey. Some read, some slept. Some dutifully filled out the square of the crossword; some small children tormented the elderly by running up and down the length of the corridoors screaming excitedly at the tops of their voices, it was oh so very nearly Christmas! Presents! fields of gaily coloured wrapping paper to rip impatiently open and reveal the secret gift inside, for they had been so good all year!

The train raced on into the lashing night.

It was approaching the Whangaehu valley, flanking the southern side of Mt Ruapehu, where it would thunder across the Tangiwai river bridge and continue its travels into the deepening darkness until finally reaching its destination. And there would be the anxious friends, family, lovers waiting to pull their loved ones close, into their cars and hearts, and whisk them away to the roaring fires and glittering Christmas trees that awaited them at their hearths. There would be laughter and joy, smiles and anticipations of the holiday to come and the simple comforts of being close to those that you loved. Aboard the train, those that slept did so with a crooked pleased smile. Even those momentarily irritated by the childerns exuberance, gave way and smiled a small, patient smile in memory of the time that they too had been filled with such a bursting, boiling energy that could not be contained, like a bursting dam.

High up in Mt Ruapehu, the earth stirred, just slightly.

Eruptions years earlier had made the earth groan and heave and threw up a loose lip of volcanic debris. Know as a tephra among the Maori, it would serve as a natural dam, filling up with water, poisoned by the sulphrous seeping of volcanic spew into the gathering waters. Over the years, the tephra had filled up, drip by drop with rain until it was almost over the lip, like an overfull glass protected only by a thin meniscus. That night, while the train forced on, it rained and it rained and it rained.

The tephra could finally hold no more, and from within, and above, the thin walls of plaster like ash and debris, finally gave way in a tired air of muddy defeat. A torrent of rock, debris and acidic water, known as a lahar, tore down the mountainside, toward the Whangaehu valley, and the Tangiwi river bridge. Among the spitting hiss of the rain, local people were unaware of the wall of rushing death that was almost silently sliding towards them.

The Maori had warned them long ago, that Ruapehu was an angry mountain, and that they were foolish to ignore its petulance. The local people were fortunate however, because unlike a flood, a lahar weakens with strength as it charges downwards, whereas a flood gathers from long and wide around and builds into a rising sea.

They escaped with their lives, their hard work washed away in a few minutes of surging water, fields ruined, houses crumbled, livestock drowned. As well as the houses, something else had been suddenly washed away. The Tangiwai river bridge, across which locomotive KA949 would soon rattle.

Some of the local people realised with an awful dread that there was no way to stop the train that was soon due. But try they still did. Hoisting lamps that had escaped the watery tumult, they raced against the driving rains of the pitch black night, swinging their feeble lanterns in warning,

'Beware! Bridge out!'

The plateman had little to concern him in the foul night that he was rushing through. A little late, but soon now he too would be gathered with his family and around the piano, would be singing the festive carols that heralded the birth day of the Lord Jesus. He blasted the horn just for the hell of it.

Behind him, in the crowded carriages, the same children that had been cavorting up and down the train were now drowsing in their mothers laps or arms, cwtching, while she hummed or sang soft lullabys to still their still twitching limbs. The villagers heard the blast of the trains steam horn, and frantically tried to provide some sort of warning. But the rain and the deluge had given them little to work with.

As the train sped round the final bend before the bridge over the gorge, the plateman suddenly knew that something was wrong, an instinct, a glimpse of space where there should have been a railroad - who knows? The brakes were slammed on, the screeching of metal against metal shrieked into the pouring night, as the feeble waving lanterns of the villagers were shot past and left behind.

The passengers were flung forward in the wake of the sudden braking and already the keening wail of those knowing that they are doomed rose among those flung forward by the desperete attempt to halt the momentum of the mighty speeding steel locomotive. The screeching of metal suddenly stopped, and an awkward moment of an utter lack of noise seemed to overpower the pounding rain.

The train had plunged down over where the bridge had been just minutes earlier. There was an almost silent thump as the engine and its carriages dived into the murky depths of the Tangiwi river.

Hours later,what their hearts had told them to be true bore its bitter fruit. One hundred and fifty one men women and children had been lost.

It was one of New Zealands greatest losses.

Villagers jumped into the swollen torrent again and again, in the desperate effort of those that are unwilling or unable to accept the fate that had befallen. On the bridge, one local men, Arthur Ellis and William Inglis, a train guard, ,managed to rescue 22 people by lifting them out of the windows of a carriage that was teetering over the yawning gap above the abyss.

Much later, Maori elders and the Pakehu or white-man councils gathered and tried to learn what they could from this disaster. The Maori said that the Pakehu had not listened to the song of the earth, that this was not the first time, and that it would not be the last.

Time rolls on.

Nearly fifty years have passed since that dreadful night. There is a memorial to those that perished, washed away like a broken stick on a raging river. In the mid nineties, Ruapehu belched again. A new tephra or dam was formed, but this time it is estimated to be anything up to 30% deeper than the laha that caused the disaster of 1953.

Unseasonal, massive rainstorms have lashed the beautiful Islands of Aortea, the tephra is full. The Maori elders have again warned that the past will once again return, as it always does, for it is a refrain in the song of time and nature.

The Pakeha council have decided that to intervene in the matter would require a beaurocratic change to the the National Parks Act, and draw attention to the World Heritage Committee, to which New Zealand has just recently been elected a member.

The monument to and the graves of the dead of that sorrowful Christmas Eve of 1953 has been moved to safer grounds. Other than that, the Pakeha council of Tangiwai have decided to do nothing.

The people of Tangiwai are weeping.

Again.

yechydda,