Blood On The Tracks 01 | Blood On The Tracks

Unravel

ABC Australia

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture

0.0 • 0 Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2018

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Thirty years of mystery surrounds the death of 17-year-old Mark Haines.

It’s the summer of 1988. A train hits a person early in the morning on its way out of Tamworth. Straight away, something doesn’t add up about the scene where the body is found. A rail worker notices strange inconsistencies at the scene. If this was suicide, why is there so little blood?

The boy on the tracks is Mark Haines, a Gomeroi teenager with friends on both sides of the tracks. We meet his uncle Don (Duck) Craigie, who has been tirelessly searching for answers since Mark’s death. He suspects foul play.

We trace Mark’s movements on the night before his death, as he hits the town on a big night out with a bunch of friends, dancing, drinking and having fun. Mark’s friends and girlfriend say they left him in the early hours. Just after, a nearby resident hears voices on the street, what sounds like an argument, and a car driving dangerously.

But the next few hours remain a mystery. How did Mark end up on the tracks?

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an ABC podcast.
0:04.3	If you're an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island a person,
0:07.9	we want you to know that this series contains the name of someone who has died.
0:15.0	It's just after dawn on a Saturday morning in Tamworth, a town in northern New South Wales.
0:24.0	A freight train driver eases his cargo out of the station to begin the journey south to Sydney. He's scanning the horizon as the train picks up speed and leaves the city limits.
0:51.3	There's a light drizzle so the driver can't see that well.
0:55.0	His eyes strained to make out something up ahead on the tracks.
1:00.0	He thinks it might be a pile of questions. the The driver pulls the emergency brake. stopping,
1:13.0	lying between the rails.
1:15.0	The driver pulls the emergency brake. Great.
1:28.0	Stopping a 300 ton train quickly is impossible. It screeches down the straight track. The entire length of the train has gone over the body.
1:47.0	The driver doesn't want to get out.
1:50.0	He knows what's waiting for him a few hundred meters back. I got a call from the driver on the train to say that he had passed over a body and I did ask him to go back and see if he could render any assistance.
2:15.0	It makes the train drivers won't go back and do that.
2:18.0	That's Glenn Bryant, the West Hamworth Assistant stationmaster at the time.
2:23.3	I thought to myself, well, I better go out just in case the person is still alive.
2:28.6	Glenn's no stranger to this. He's already seen one lifeless body on the tracks. He's hoping this time is different.
2:35.6	I had a rough idea where the body was because I think the train would have been doing
2:40.1	about 80 and 90 kilometers an hour to there about maybe a bit less than that.
2:44.8	I could call off my bike and walked over to the rear of the train and that's where I found his body.
2:51.3	And when I approached him I saw him laying in the forefoot.
2:55.0	In the forefoot, that's train people speak for the space between the rails.
	...

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