All along the route of the Great Western line as it winds through the small towns of Gloucestershire, on past Berkshire and the neat, grey suburbs of London, there are wrecked lives and broken hearts.
Mothers and fathers, husbands and wives wait in the houses of these small towns for "Sarah" or "Paul" to walk through the door. They know, and we know, their lives will never be the same again because the people who sat in Carriage H of the 6.03 a.m. Great Western train from Cheltenham to London on Tuesday will not walk back through the door.
On the bank of the hill overlooking the Ladbroke Grove train tracks, a policeman clad in a high visibility orange jacket and white hard hat walks down to the Great Western train.
He is alone as his colleagues take photographs, sift through debris and stand in small groups talking. He stops beside the charred shell of a train carriage, ripped back on itself by the force of the collision so that only part of the carriage inside is visible.
The hole through which he is looking could be a window but it is hard to tell because it is bent and twisted out of shape like a huge wound. He stops, only for a moment, but there is nothing left of the carriage inside, just a big black hole. The policeman looks away, stares at his feet and walks on.
Not long afterwards, Supt Tony Thompson, of the British Transport Police, holds another press conference in the grounds of Sainsbury's supermarket. When will the search of Carriage H begin? What does he expect his team will find inside?
He clasps his hands together and looks across the car-park to the crash site. "We do not know what we are going to find," he says calmly. "It is full of ash, debris all over. It is a burnt-out shell that is a sea of ash from end to end, perhaps knee to waist-deep, we do not know what is below it."
It will take 20 hours to construct the 100-tonne crane that will carefully lift Carriage H from the track, he explains, and another 24 hours after that to secure it with scaffolding inside and out so that the coroner and his team can search the fire-scorched shell. Carriage H will not give up its dead until tomorrow or Sunday.
Some loved one is still inside Carriage H, or perhaps underneath it. For the dead there are no more deadlines to meet; no more sky; no more looking forward to seeing someone they love, and no more pain.
But for the ones left behind, some visit the scene of the crash, maybe to make it real. And others leave bunches of flowers near the tracks with notes pleading for answers; nurses, doctors, checkout girls; unsigned messages.
"Bureaucratic incompetence claimed more lives again," says one note. "To the many who set out to work and never returned" reads another. And attached to a bouquet of lilies someone has written: "Profit before lives - criminal and tragic."
The beautiful, sleek crane with the name Baldwins written along its length lies horizontal and long like a space rocket beside the tracks at Ladbroke Grove. Its size and strength dominate the crash scene. Beside it, the men who will construct it wait for their orders.
The men and women of the emergency services stare at the blue and white tarpaulin covering Carriage H, waiting for their orders. Mothers and fathers, husbands and wives wait for their loved ones.