Of the 113 passengers on the June 4 train journey, 21 were killed and a further 47 were injured when the express failed to take a curve in a deep cutting and derailed.
The boiler burst, carriages piled up, debris was strewn and the scene was described by an attending doctor as resembling the result of a bomb blast.
Mrs Graham (nee Bennetts) was a 22-year-old home science teacher living in Dunedin at the time, travelling on the Central Otago passenger train each week to teach classes at Middlemarch and Ranfurly.
This week, Mrs Graham (91) visited relatives and friends in Otago with her daughter Karen Monk, before returning to her Auckland home.
She gave the Otago Daily Times her second interview, having spoken to a reporter on June 4, 1943, at the Dunedin Railway Station just hours after walking from the train wreckage.
Mrs Graham said it was an unusual feeling to stand beside someone searching for their loved ones among the debris.
"There was an elderly woman.
"I don't think she knew she had lost the first joint of her finger and it was just dripping blood.
"Her husband, daughter and three grandchildren were on that train, and at 22 I didn't know what to say to a lady like that.
"She didn't say anything, just stood there with this blood dripping from her finger," Mrs Graham said.
She also vividly recalled a farmer galloping on horseback across paddocks towards the wreckage.
"His son was on the train. He had come on board five minutes earlier at the Hyde station and he died in the crash," she said.
A passenger in the last of the train's seven carriages, Mrs Graham was not injured in the crash, but was given two weeks' leave for shingles brought on by trauma and stress.
However, her most frightening train moment had yet to come.
"A fortnight after the Hyde crash, I was back on the train when the guard came through and said 'hold on, the brakes on the engine have failed'. We went down the [Taieri] gorge banging into the sides of the tunnel," she said.
Mrs Graham again walked uninjured from the train, still undeterred by the mode of travel.
She said there was little time to whinge back then, and those without cars had no alternative.
In subsequent overseas travel, she journeyed on trains in Russia and China, and boarded others through New Zealand.
Another memory of the Hyde crash was kept alive by the gift of a jug, which remained in the family.
"It was around my birthday and the woodwork teacher had a wedding present with him on the train. It broke in pieces and he gave it to me for my birthday as a joke," Mrs Graham said.
At age 24, she married and followed her mining engineer husband to Reefton.
A few years ago, she was put in touch with another Hyde survivor, who was a 10-year-old in 1943.
"She said she was thrown from the third carriage up beside the engine and thought she was in hell because of the heat and steam. She spent six weeks in Ranfurly hospital," Mrs Graham said.
Yesterday, Mrs Graham and her daughter visited distant relative Richard Hay, who bought the Hyde Railway Station in 1990.
Mr Hay's grandmother and Mrs Graham's mother were sisters.
