The men were part of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, the volunteer army that New Zealand had sent across the world to fight Germany's war. By September 1917 the country had already lost thousands of its young men at Gallipoli, on the Somme, and in the appalling mud of Passchendaele, which was still being fought as the Ulimaroa and Norman crossed the equator. These soldiers were the reinforcements. They had travelled six weeks by sea to reach a country most of them had never seen, en route to a battlefield that none of them yet imagined. The unscheduled stop at Bere Ferrers was a mundane detail in a journey that was supposed to end somewhere far more dangerous. Instead it ended on a Devon railway track, before any of them had fired a shot in anger.

Everything that went wrong was small. In New Zealand, trains had platforms on the right. In England, at Bere Ferrers that afternoon, the platform was on the right as the train had entered. But after the long journey, the soldiers had instinctively turned and stepped down the way they had stepped up, the way they remembered, which placed them on the down line where the express was about to come through. The inquest later made this point carefully. They had not been reckless. They had simply done what felt natural, in a country whose railways followed different conventions than their own. The driver of the express did everything he could, sounding a prolonged blast on his whistle as he approached, but the line curves sharply on the approach to the station and by the time he saw the men on the track it was too late to stop.

Nine soldiers were killed instantly. A tenth died later at Tavistock Hospital. The express finally came to a halt a quarter of a mile beyond the station. One of the survivors said something afterward that the inquest recorded, and it has been quoted in every account of the accident since: "We never thought of expresses travelling at 40 miles per hour. They don't travel at that rate in New Zealand. It was a wonder more of us were not killed." The dead were buried in Plymouth's Efford Cemetery. Their families, on the other side of the world, would not have learned of their deaths for weeks. Their names are inscribed on the New Zealand memorial at Bere Ferrers, where a small commemoration has been held each September for over a century. The youngest was 20. The oldest was in his thirties. They are still remembered as a small grief among the millions of greater griefs that the Great War made.

Bere Ferrers railway station is still in use today, served by trains on the scenic Tamar Valley Line between Plymouth and Gunnislake. The platform looks much as it did in 1917. The curve in the line is the same curve. The express trains no longer thunder through at the speeds they once did; the line is a quiet branch now, the through route long since lifted. In 2001, following a request by the New Zealand National Army Museum, a memorial plaque was unveiled in the village centre to the men who died here. Each anniversary, locals and visiting New Zealanders gather at the small monument and read the names aloud. The story matters in two countries: in New Zealand, where it is taught in schools as one of the strangest tragedies of the war, and in Devon, where a small village station keeps the memory of ten young men whose long voyage ended one stop too early.