Due to the remote location, it took approximately 90 minutes for rescuers to arrive. Reports reached Middlemarch of an accident where there "were possibly a few injuries" and medical personnel did not initially travel in a hurry to the disaster, but upon catching sight of the disaster from a rise in the road half a mile away, they proceeded swiftly. In the intervening time, the injured were tended by the passengers from the relatively undamaged rear carriages and by local farmer Pat Kinney, who owned the property through which the cutting ran; Kinney's son Frank had boarded the train at its last stop in Hyde and was one of the deceased. Some passengers were trapped in the wreckage for several hours and medical personnel – with the assistance of railway maintenance staff – worked until it was too dark to see.