Towards the end of last year my husband and I and a family member were travelling home from Sydney by train from a medical appointment and had to be transferred to a bus at Mount Victoria to complete our journey to Lithgow. 

On the bus was a man who became quite violent and was almost ripping the doors off the bus before the driver removed him and his suitcase from the bus. 

He asked somebody to ring the police and I did. I explained the level of violence and the urgency of the situation to the police officer I spoke to. 

This happened about 5.30pm and I could see the Bell railway station off to the north of where we were.

We got onto the bus travelling from Lithgow to Orange and I received a phone call from another police officer when this bus was at about Shadforth.

He explained that his car had been busy all day, he had only just come on duty and had found the job on his list of work. 

I was horrified, considering the stress I had put on my original call about the man’s actions. 

It was only when we were telling our story to a friend who had been a nurse at Bloomfield and recognised the symptoms that he said it appeared to be somebody coming down from ice.

While I recognise the workload of our police force, I would have thought that for the safety of the community and the state of mind of the person involved, it would have been dealt with more urgently.

Mary Grocott,

Orange