In a sense, then, for a decade or so before the development of improved mine hospital facilities on the Rand, Red Cross coaches were little more than coffins-on-wheels and part of a systemic mass-evacuation campaign for permanently disabled ‘rejects’ and the terminally ill.

The Chamber of Mines and the readers of the English-medium press on the Witwatersrand were content to see the hard-pressed, unqualified and occasionally well-meaning conductors portrayed as ‘hospital orderlies’ - in line with the display of the Red Cross on coaches. They were, for the most part, totally out of their depth when it came to dealing with terminally ill or seriously sick patients in hospital coaches. A series of rail accidents towards the end of the First World War allowed two of the longest-serving conductors to point out ‘the futility of coping with an accident of any size without the present First Aid means at our disposal’, and to plead for any additional medical supplies including a ‘stove, so that [an] ample supply of hot water might be available for washing wounds, etc.

The magic of managerial words, deftly deployed, turned the ill, the walking wounded, the lunatics and others into ‘convalescents’ - who by the WNLA’s own admission left the hospital coaches in worse conditions than they had entered them. It was precisely part of this same unspoken 40-year-long tussle between the cash-starved, revenue-seeking Railway Administration on the one hand, and the profit-driven, cost-pairing initiatives of the Chamber of Mines on the other, that eventually led to the partial abandonment of the WNLA’s already minimal so-called Red Cross service.

By mid-1963 the full down-train, replete with two Red Cross coaches, a ghostly spectre most often glimpsed gnawing away at the tracks of the great Eastern Main Line during the early hours of the morning, was seen less often. The 307 and its hospital-on-wheels without doctors or patients continued to do it as it had done for half a century, ferrying the living dead and the mentally impaired across the River Styx at Komatipoort/ Ressano Garcia. The down-train had often left the souls uncoupled from the bodies of the returning migrants, but that was not its full repertoire. It was also the vehicle by which men were separated from their savings and few worldly goods.

And what the SARP could not, or would not, provide by way of safeguarding the returning miners and their possessions, the Chamber of Mines and the WNLA - two bodies controlling private police of most descriptions when it came to protecting mine property or on-site black labour - were unwilling to supplement. So, just as the 307 hospital coaches were without doctors or trained nurses for the terminally ill, so were vulnerable passengers carrying meaningful amounts of goods and wages on the slow down-train left without the benefit of protection of the South Africsn Railways or any dedicated WNLA train police.