Day was ending as the eleven jam-packed coaches of the 5:28 from Durban clattered toward suburban Effingham Junction Station. The cars carried 1,200 blacks returning from their jobs in the city to crowded Kwa Mashu, the native "location" ten miles away. Suddenly, reported an observer, "as I looked along the track, I saw the electric unit at the tail end topple over." With it came the train's last passenger compartment, bouncing like a toy over the jagged fill of the roadbed.
In the 90 sickening seconds before the train ground to a stop, a second coach jumped the track, then a third. For a moment, beneath the dust raised by the wreck, an eerie silence reigned, punctuated only by the screams of the wounded trapped in the shattered cars. Along the track lay bodies, some in piles, some flung as far as 350 feet away. In all, 86 were killed, some 200 seriously injured.
The tragedy had one other life to claim, and it was a sacrifice not to some mechanical failure but to the bitterness and frustration that is never far beneath the surface among Africans in the land of apartheid. As the scratched and bloodied survivors tumbled from the wreckage, one black shouted: "It's the Europeans who planned this murder of our brothers." The first white man to come to the aid of the wounded—signalman Walter Hartslief, 25, who ran to the scene from his trackside station—was surrounded by the furious mob, beaten, knifed and trampled to death in the dust.