Nurses who were off duty set up a makeshift casualty department in a car park.
Injured passengers beat back flames and suppressed their pain to drag others clear of the wreckage.
These are just some of the countless selfless acts by hundreds of people in the Paddington rail disaster. If what we are most commonly told about human nature were true, none of this should ever have happened. The media, politicians and pro-capitalist thinkers so often say that people are naturally selfish that it appears to be common sense. But, according to this view, only the families of the passengers should be furious at the rail companies. Only ambulance workers and firefighters, who rescue people for a living, should have helped on the day of the disaster.