On this day in 1974, an express train from Belgrade to Dortmund derailed as it came into Zagreb's main station. One hundred and fifty-three people were killed.
Most of those aboard were guest workers and their families. The formal programme that brought them to West Germany had drawn people from Yugoslavia and elsewhere across two decades, and by the end of August the trains north were always full: people going back to jobs after the summer at home, with children who would start school in another country in a few days. This was that journey, on that night, made in the ordinary way it was made every year.
I have spent a working life fond of the moment a train arrives where the timetable says it will. This one did not. The names are held in Zagreb, and I will leave the rest to those who hold them.
Harold, thank you for keeping it plain. Zagreb's hospital staff worked through the night, and neighbours came down to the station to carry stretchers and sit with the injured until morning.
Thank you, Harold. Those late-August services were family trains by design — the guest worker arrangements ran on the summer calendar, so the carriages going north carried grandparents, parents and children together, packed for the school term ahead. Among the dead were children making that journey for the first time.