Sri Lanka's seismic monitoring station at Pallekele registered the earthquake within minutes. But the scientists did not believe a tsunami could reach the island. When reports of the wave finally reached the dispatching office at Maradana, officials managed to halt eight other trains running on the Coastal Line. They could not reach the Matara Express. At Ambalangoda station, every available staff member was helping the train's passengers, leaving no one to answer the ringing telephone. By the time someone picked up, the train had already departed. Attempts to contact stations further south failed entirely: the staff had either fled or been killed by the water. The train continued along the coast, its passengers unaware of what was coming, carried forward by a chain of small, human failures that no single person could have prevented.

When the ocean began to surge inland, hundreds of local residents from the surrounding area saw the Matara Express and made a decision that seemed rational: they climbed onto the train. A locomotive on steel rails looked immovable. Families clambered onto the roof of the carriages to escape the rising water. Others stood behind the train, hoping its mass would shield them from the force of the wave. The first surge flooded the carriages and caused panic. Ten minutes later, a far larger wave lifted the entire train from the tracks and smashed it against the trees and houses lining the railway. The people who had sheltered behind the train were crushed. The eight carriages were so packed with passengers that the doors could not be opened as water filled the compartments. Almost everyone inside drowned. Those riding on the roof were thrown clear when the carriages overturned, and most drowned or were killed by debris. Engineer Janaka Fernando and his assistant Sivaloganathan died at their posts. The locomotive was carried 100 meters and came to rest in a swamp.

The scale of the broader tsunami disaster was so overwhelming that Sri Lankan authorities did not even know where the train was for several hours. An army helicopter spotted the wreckage around 4 p.m. Local emergency services had been destroyed. Help was slow to arrive, and dozens of people who survived the initial impact died in the wreckage during the long hours that followed. Families traveled to the area to search for their relatives themselves. According to authorities, only about 150 people on the train survived. The estimated death toll was at least 1,000 and possibly as many as 1,700. Only approximately 900 bodies were recovered; many had been swept out to sea or taken away by families. The town of Peraliya itself was nearly annihilated, losing hundreds of residents and all but ten of its buildings. More than 200 bodies were never identified. Three days after the disaster, Buddhist monk Baddegama Samitha and his students performed funeral rites near the torn railway line, and the unclaimed dead were buried in a Buddhist ceremony.

The railway was repaired. The town of Peraliya was rebuilt. W. Karunatilaka, the guard who was on the train and survived, returned to work the same Colombo-to-Galle route. Locomotive No. 591 Manitoba, the Canadian-built engine that had pulled the Matara Express, was salvaged from the swamp, rebuilt, and given a new detail in its paint: a wave, rendered as a permanent memorial on the locomotive's body. Every December 26th since 2008, the rebuilt Manitoba and two restored carriages have returned to Peraliya for a religious ceremony and memorial service. The gathering is not a spectacle. It is a community's refusal to let the dead become statistics. The people who died on the Matara Express were commuters and holiday travelers, parents taking children to visit family, workers heading home for the long weekend. Remembering them means remembering that ordinary life, on an ordinary morning, was interrupted by a force that no warning system detected and no steel rails could resist.