He described it as absolute mayhem.

"It looked horrible," Mr Strevens told The Advertiser.

"It's exactly as if you imagine a truck running into a train and hitting it in the middle.

"There were police people, fire engines, ambulances, trucks, cars all over the place and the police were trying to secure the scene, obviously.

"It was pretty ordinary."

Mr Strevens said he arrived about 2.30pm - almost an hour after the crash.

"Everybody was still getting there," he said.

"There were people coming and going and cars and trucks and police cars flashing past everybody on the road.

"They'd cut off the scene about three to four kilometres in either direction and didn't let other media in for quite a while."

His extensive media experience did not prepare him for the horrible scenes that confronted him.

"We've all seen stuff in this industry that we don't want to see, but when it's people from your town, and there's 10,000 people, you obviously know a lot of them," Mr Strevens said.

But there were some positives from the day's carnage.

"There were people that weren't injured who helped the injured, that helped the elderly - typical of the cliched Australian spirit that what you would expect from people; it came to the fore and they looked after others."

Sue Fyffe, a passenger on the train, told Sky News she had never had an experience like it in her life, and she never wanted to again.

"It was just awful; it was just devastating," she said.

Ms Fyffe said while she did not see the semi-trailer hit the train, she was close to another woman who did.

"She closed her eyes because she thought it was going to hit us," she said.

"The truck actually tried to veer around us and he hit a pole, which probably saved him from hitting my carriage.

"He veered into the dirt and hit a pole, and then careered into the carriage behind us.

"Someone said maybe the sun was in his eyes when he was coming up to the crossing and when he did see us, he did apparently try and divert and went into the dirt and hit a pole.

"It was just a mess, the site - there were people sitting with glass all over them and we could hear

people screaming and crying."