Asking to swap seats with a woman on a train hurtling towards Australia's worst rail disaster wasn't Ros Simms' only stroke of good luck on January 18, 1977.
The then 17-year-old was on the crowded 6.09am Sydney-bound commuter train from Mount Victoria, in the Blue Mountains, when it derailed at Granville in Sydney's west and struck a concrete road overpass.
Within seconds, the bridge and cars moving across it crashed onto the carriages below.
The tragedy claimed 83 lives and 210 people were injured.
33 years later, Ms Simms says she owes her life to two people travelling in the third carriage with her that morning.
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"I asked the lady sitting next to me if we could swap seats because I get motion sickness," Ms Simms said at a memorial service at the site of the disaster on Monday. The woman agreed.
"She died, I didn't," Ms Simms said.
She also recalled the man who tried to comfort her when she screamed in fright at "three almighty jolts".
The man fell on top of her as the overpass bridge above them collapsed onto their carriage.
She was knocked unconscious, but believes the man, who died, had shielded her from being crushed.
Friendship between survivors
Ms Simms has recently befriended another of the disaster's young survivors, Tina Morgan, who was 14 in 1977.
Now a nurse on the Gold Coast, Ms Morgan said she still remembers an encounter with two young girls travelling in her carriage.
"I could hear them giggling. I said 'hello'," she said. Years later she learned they also died in the disaster.
Ms Morgan sustained a broken back and broken wrist in the incident. A piece of timber also pierced her chest.
She still suffers from back pain associated with the tragedy.
Those who attended a moving ceremony at Granville Town Hall today to mark the anniversary of the disaster included seven survivors, emergency services workers, and family and friends of victims.
Former crane driver Eddy Bonnici, who was working in Granville on the day, attends the ceremony every year.
Police called on him to help move the wreckage - and decades later he still feels traumatised.
"It's one of these things that never gets out of your mind," he said while wiping away tears. "It's a wonder more people weren't killed."
Disaster 'should never have happened'
Granville Memorial Trust president John Hennessey said the disaster should never have happened, and urged the "powers that be" to upgrade an "antique 19th century railway system" so that there would be fewer accidents.
"The XPT uses the same lines that were built for steam engines," he said.
At the end of the ceremony, 83 roses were thrown from a bridge above Granville train station to acknowledge each person killed.
Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell urged people to keep pressuring politicians for safer rail services.
"We need to ensure that Sydney's rail system is modern, that it's reliable, but above all, that it offers safe passage to those who use it," he said.
"It's clear from the Glenbrook and the Waterfall rail accidents in recent times that Granville isn't an isolated incident.”
"The state government needs to start getting serious about implementing the recommendations out of the Waterfall and Glenbrook rail accidents to ensure that another Granville doesn't exist."
Seven people were killed on January 31, 2003, when a train derailed at Waterfall, south of Sydney.
