Television documentary to explore conspiracy theories and rumours surrounding tragic 1979 Ghost Train fire at Luna Park Sydney

News reports and a three-part ABC investigative documentary are exploring the suspicions, conspiracies and rumours that have been associated with the 1979 Ghost Train fire at Luna Park Sydney in which seven people died.

Set to air on the ABC as of Tuesday this week, EXPOSED: The Ghost Train will investigate what NSW Police quickly wrote off as a terrible accident, caused by an electrical fault.

However, the ABC's returning investigative documentary series has investigated many aspects of what happened to the Luna Park ride 42 years ago, exposing serious questions about the incident.

During an 18-month EXPOSED investigation, reporter Caro Meldrum-Hanna, co-creator and series producer Jaya Balendra, co-reporter Patrick Begley and researcher Dunja Karagic secured exclusive interviews with eyewitnesses, police, investigators and government insiders who have never spoken publicly before and raise serious questions about the fire, which police, at the time, declared an accident due to an electrical fault.

Meldrum-Hanna advised “many of them are taking a huge step out into the sunlight and some are even afraid for their lives, that they'll be tracked down because of what they heard or saw.

"One man said to me, 'If I do this (interview), I'm just waiting to get shot or stabbed because then that's one less witness that they have to worry about'.

"When I first rang people there would almost uniformly be this sharp intake of breath, then they'd say, 'I've been waiting for this phone call' and then there would often be tears.

"They would say things like, 'We were silenced', 'I was fobbed off'.

"It was extraordinary.

"So, for them to participate and finally break these decades-long silences is really big for them and really big for the story too because if this fire wasn't an electrical fault, if it wasn't a terrible accident and it was deliberately lit, if it was arson, we are now looking at the definition of a mass killing.

"That's how bloody serious it is.

"You've got six children and a man incinerated and claims of corruption so you're treading in really tricky and perilous places here."

Advising that investigating the Ghost Train fire was troubling, Meldrum-Hanna went on to say “we've got seven bodies, a bloody mountain of suspicious circumstances and no-one has been held to account.

"As one of our interviewees said: 'It stinks to high heaven'."

As for what the investigation has uncovered, Meldrum-Hanna added “our interviews are very interactive and we provided people with the confidential reports and documents that we had obtained that they'd never seen before and they explored them with us which led to all these penny-drop, lightbulb moments for them and they'd say, 'See, I wasn't lying, there are other people who are saying and thinking this'.”

Mindful of the ABC’s upcoming coverage, the Sydney Morning Herald has today republished a 2007 report suggesting notorious crime figure Abe Saffron was behind the deadly fire.

28 years after the fire, award-winning Herald investigative journalist Kate McClymont revealed the claims in a succession of stories.

She reported that Saffron was the subject of a National Crime Authority investigation into a succession of fires at commercial premises and that Saffron either sought to own or was an alleged ‘secret’ owner of the attraction.

Within the NCA report it stated “Luna Park, it was alleged, had been coveted by Saffron for over 20 years and the fire in the ghost train had been lit as a trigger to evict the incumbent tenants and gain control of the park lease for himself.”

The three-part series of EXPOSED: The Ghost Train Fire begins on ABC TV and iview at 8.30pm on Tuesday 16th March.

Images: The aftermath of the 1979 Ghost Train fire at Luna Park Sydney (top, credit: Twisted Histories), extract from the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald in 2007 revealing claims of links between the fire and underworld figure Abe Saffron (middle, credit: SMH) and promotion for the ABC documentary (below).