On 8 July 1930, a man was killed and his body mutilated on the tracks close to Yanderra station. Authorities determined his cause of death to be from falling out of a train. On 9 March 1930, a car travelling over a nearby railway bridge crashed through the brick and onto the track, resulting in a woman inside the vehicle breaking her back. On the night of 30 August 1932, 32 year-old Edna Burgess was struck and killed by the
Melbourne Express on the south side of the station. The force of the accident mutilated the upper half of her body, whilst severing both her arms and decapitating her. A handbag with a blank cheque form was found near her, allowing for her identification by authorities. On 24 February 1947, a truck crashed into the parapet of a nearby railway bridge, dislodging three tonnes of bricks onto the tracks and injuring the two young men inside.
Yanderra payroll robbery On the night of 7 December 1941, a
New South Wales FP5 railway
paybus was deliberately blown up in an attempted robbery by a homemade
dynamite bomb attached to a wire acting as a detonator, and laid on the tracks near the station. The force of the explosion completely destroyed portions of the paybus, and twisted the
perway. Two of the three workers inside were killed instantly, with the third dying in hospital after being rescued from underneath the wreckage. The incident resulted in a nationwide
manhunt for the perpetrators. Although the murders were never solved, by the mid-1950s it became generally accepted that the robbery had been orchestrated by Lionel Charles Thomas, who had become notorious for the 1950 murder of widow Phyllis Page. Serving in the
Australian Army during
World War II, Thomas had been dishonourably discharged for theft, and by the 1950s, had been tried for murder four times including that of an assistant stationmaster at
Carnegie railway station in
Melbourne in 1945. He had also been charged for blinding two men in separate pepper attacks. He hanged himself in his prison cell in 1951. == References ==