“Get up! Come on, you have to get up!”

My inner sergeant-major was not letting me just lie there, no matter what I might have wanted. My head was definitely bleeding, I could feel the tell-tale stickiness in my hair. I looked around at the carnage and almost immediately had to fight back the urge to vomit – there were a lot of dead people sharing this space with me and it was not pretty.

The carriage was clearly derailed and tilted at a difficult 30 degree angle. The lights were either out or dangling from their wires, like potentially fatal pendulums. The hole in the side, about half way along, looked for all the world as if someone incredibly strong had thrown a huge marble against the carriage wall. I steeled my nerve and started checking the other passengers to see if anyone in there with me was still alive. Nothing can prepare you for the real outcome of a bomb going off in an enclosed space and no one should have to see it. As I checked for signs of life all I could wonder was; how did I survive?