Train coach smashes into car workshop

HENNIE Cillier has been running Cillier’s Body Repairs at Swakopmund for the past 27 years, and never have imagined that one day he would have a train carriage ‘parked’ in his workshop.

This was exactly what happened at around midnight on Thursday. Cillier received a call from a local security company alerting him that his work alarm had gone off.’I told them to go and have a look, thinking it was probably something small, but they called again and told me to rather come and have a look myself,’ he said.When he opened his workshop’s large garage doors the reason for the alarm was clear. The intruder was a seven-metre-long train carriage that had smashed through the shop’s back wall and crashed through four parked cars inside. Work on two of the cars was completed on Thursday and Cillier was going to tell the owners to collect their vehicles on Friday.Jamie Vecchio of Bannerman Resources arrived at the shop on Friday morning to collect his car, which he needed that day to transport visitors from his head office in Australia.’I’m speechless,’ Vecchio told The Namibian. ‘We brought the car to be given some body maintenance, which was supposed to be ready for us to pick up today, and now we find a train crashed into it – in the workshop.’Cillier’s Body Repairs is situated in a light industrial complex adjacent to the Swakopmund Salt Company’s depot. Trains frequently enter the depot to load tonnes of salt.According to witnesses, the driver of the last train allegedly kept on shunting carriages onto the railway line on the depot’s premises, not paying attention to the back of the line.This pushed the last carriage in the line into Cillier’s workshop, which is about 150 metres from the Salt Company’s dispatch area. ‘It’s very hard to say what the damage is, but it’s very big,’ Cillier said.