The Remants of a Tragedy: Barnawartha: VIC

[KANACKI]

Greeting once again lovers of paranormal, the supernatural and down right weird. The Follow yarn begs to asked the question can faint memories of tragic event be recorded and be replayed years later into peoples subconscious who has never had any knowledge of such past events?

For example you driving down the road as all of sudden you feel a tragic accident had happened on the spot years ago and for brief moment you felt it. Or vision and apparition like a subliminal message come and go or even sound a scream. For a split second or perhaps longer you parted the natural world  into a super natural one?

The following yarn I give a big thumbs up for to Headless for finding this rather recent story. Its a story of an alleged haunted railway station now disused. Fitting to as railways was once the most important mode of passenger transportation once. Any many people lost their lives around trains.

The following picture alleged haunted train station of the train station below. For those guests who cannot see the picture below I suggest signing up to this wonderful forum to get a fantastic insight into haunted places in Australia and much more?

As always

To be continued.........

Kanacki

[KANACKI]

Barnawartha is a closed station located in the town of Barnawartha, on the North East railway, in Victoria, Australia. The station building and platform lie between the Melbourne - Albury standard gauge line, opened in 1962, and the former broad gauge line, converted to standard gauge in 2010. There is a disused goods shed to the west of the tracks.

The station opened with the line in 1873, with a temporary passenger shelter and a large brick goods shed. In 1885, a signal cabin was provided, as well as platform extensions, and construction of a siding to a nearby flour mill. In 1889, the brick station building was erected and, in 1925, the signal frame was made part of the station building. At the same time, all tracks in the yard were lengthened to accommodate longer trains.

The station Closed in the 1985, the buildings remain largely intact, but the sidings have been removed and the west track realigned away from the platform.

Barnawartha was the site of a collision between a Melbourne-bound goods train and the Melbourne-bound Spirit of Progress on 17 June 1982. The collision, which happened north of the station, in heavy fog, occurred after the crew of the goods train ran past a red signal protecting the stationary Spirit of Progress, which had broken down due to a loss of power to the engine.

The goods train ran into the back of the Spirit at a speed of 46 km/h, killing the two-man crew on board the goods train, and injuring nine other people. Train controllers in Melbourne could not warn the goods train crew of the danger due to the lack of two-way radio systems on board locomotives at the time.

It was just one of tragedies connected with the railway station.

To be continued......


Kanacki

[KANACKI]

Headless found a story told by another ghost researcher about a story told to him on as train to Melbourne.

This is that researchers story below.

I was researching the infamous Southern Aurora train disaster at Violet Town of February 1969 early last year. I wondered if there was any residual energy of the accident that claimed 9 lives and injured 122 people but could find no stories or rumours that supported that. A few weeks later in February 2020, I was on a train bound for Melbourne to attend a conference for the company I worked for. I was reading a book about true ghost stories and then suddenly, the older guy next to me started to chat. He had some interesting stuff to tell.

Alex had worked for what was now known as V-Line for almost thirty years, starting out as a conductor in the late 70s and then largely as a train driver. Now he lived in Wangaratta and helped out on building sites as he approached retirement. He went on about trains and the different engines that powered them for a while and then got down to the real reason for his sudden conversation. His sudden desire to talk to me in the end was about the supernatural. Questions like, did I believe and had I ever seen anything followed. And then he told me his stories.

To be continued......


Kanacki

[KANACKI]

He said that as a V-Line worker he had experienced some ghostly stuff. I quickly asked him if anything had to do with Violet Town and the ’69 tragedy, but he replied in the negative. His experiences had centred around Barnawartha station, some 31 kilomtres south-west of where I lived in Albury. He went on to tell me lots of things about his career and of course what spooky stuff he’d witnessed, and I jotted things down on a notepad, which Alex didn’t seem to mind at all.

On 17 June 1982 around 7:50am, two V-Line employees were killed near Barnawartha station when two Melbourne bound trains – a goods and the passenger carrying Spirit of Progress - collided in heavy fog. The waiting goods train had miss-read a red light and ran into the back of the passenger train killing the two goods train operators.

To be continued......


Kanacki

[KANACKI]

Alex said that after that, strange fog had been seen around the station, even though weather conditions were fine elsewhere. He also said, and this is what spooked him even more, that when passenger trains stopped there on some mornings, there was a huge crash of steel on steel. Other people heard it as well but of course, there was nothing there. Alex went onto say that agonizing screams were also heard just outside the other end of the station which he thought were “totally weird”.

I have to say that I was exhausted talking to Alex until he got off at Wangaratta. He spoke almost non-stop, except when we went past Barnawartha, when he became very silent suddenly, not even looking out the windows. Passenger trains ceased stopping there not long after the Spirit of Progress accident. After returning from the conference, as covid started to hit, I wondered, was there any truth to Alex’s detailed tales? Before that though I had the unnerving experience of seeing the same train that I returned on the day before, derail and kill two people just south of Seymour on February 19th.

To be continued.....

Kanacki

[KANACKI]

The Barnawartha station was opened in 1873 to service the growing agricultural community around the area. Shortly after in November 1877, a couple named William and Amelia Howard from the town were killed by a train as they ran across the tracks. This was near where Alex said he had heard screams of agony. In May 1907 a young man fell while alighting a train at the station and fell and died from his injuries. It seems that the immediate location of the station to the centre of the small town meant that people maybe weren’t as alert to the high-speed dangers that they were accustomed to in their rural life.

In 2003 a man was killed just south of the station as he walked across the railroad. Even as late as January 2020, there was a train derailment and minor collision of a freight train and V-Line train near the station. My passenger pal Alex even mentioned that some thought the A S317 locomotive that had been involved in the 1982 crash was jinxed, as the exact same train had been involved in a another accident south in Broadford in 1967. The wrecked train was returned to Melbourne for examination and apparently spooky stories persisted (Australasia Post).

To be continued......

Kanacki

[KANACKI]

After all of this, I decided to check out the Barnie station myself in June 2020. The border was still open and I lived in the so-called ‘ border bubble’. It was a bright autumn’s day and even though I would have preferred some fog and an early morning visit, I had to accept a just before midday jaunt. No fog anywhere on the trip but when I got to the disused station, I swear there were small swirling mists of … whatever it was. About the size of my hand. I took a series of photos, or so I thought, but nothing came out. The photo below is taken at the station from another website but is similar to what I saw with my own eyes.

After a breezy drive down the freeway from Albury, all was very still at Barnawartha Station. I left and drove south for a kilometre and the breeze returned. But all was unmoving, quiet and slightly unnerving at the station. No groans or the sounds of metal-on-metal, but just a feeling of despair and loneliness. I suppose that is the atmosphere of disused buildings overall.   

Is Barnawartha Station haunted? I cannot tell, and there are no internet references to it being so. But the animated Alex and his tales will stay with me. And so will my tingling senses and misty platform visions on the day I went to check it out. I’m getting old … maybe I need an eyesight test, but this a serious place of historic feeling, with a forlorn sense of loss. Barnawatha station has a history of tragedy and atmosphere in spades.


And its that history that haunts and works it way into our haunted folklore? Do people really see Remants of past events played out in given environmental conditions?

Kanacki

[KANACKI]

I wonder if certain times of day or year the alleged paranormal activity is more active?

Kanacki