By Paul McGeough in The Hague Flight MH17: How an Australian policeman received the train of the dead AFP Senior Sergeant Rod Anderson was head of disaster victim identification at the MH17 crash site. Photo: KATE GERAGHTY This wasn't going to work. Rod Anderson had been given more than 300 coffins, but the screws to seal the lids came with ornate finials. How was he going to stack them?
The Aussie cop called for 1000 flat- head screws and power drills to drive them home. In the nick of time a local "go-to" guy delivered - and so Anderson and his international colleagues were ready to receive "the train of the dead". 
Early in the afternoon a blue locomotive emerged from a gap in dense greenery hauling four decrepit refrigerated wagons, their door edges oozing globs of foam insulation that served as a makeshift seal.
It was   July 22, 2014, and the remains of the victims of the crash of Malaysia Airways Flight MH17 were being delivered to a disaster response team in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second biggest city and a last stop before entering separatist-controlled territory to the south, and on the Russian border.
Two days earlier, amid angry demands from world capitals for the release of the train, I had glimpsed the dank interior of one of the wagons at Torrez, a rundown rail siding near where the Boeing 777 had crashed on the afternoon of   July 17.
When the doors were opened for overwhelmed foreign officials to gauge the enormity of an uncertain repatriation task, the air was rank and the cargo fetid. Packed into an assortment of plastic bags, these human remains had been left in the open for two days, in 30-degree summer heat, before being piled atop each other for shipment.
Senior Sergeant Anderson, of the Australian Federal Police, was here because 41 of the dead were from Australia.
Flying out of Canberra on   July 18, this cop had first travelled to the Netherlands to help establish a command centre for what inevitably would be a sprawling international operation - victims from 10 countries; at least seven governments demanding a role in the investigation; the crash site inaccessible, because it was in a hot war zone; and rising geopolitical tension, as a Western finger of blame was pointed at Russia and the separatist militias it was sponsoring in a brutal Ukrainian civil war.
But when news of the train of the dead came through, Anderson was re-routed to Kharkiv, where a cavernous space in an abandoned Soviet-era weapons factory was being prepared as a transit mortuary. With just 36 hours to do the job, the clean up was more a lick-and-a-wipe than a clinical scrub-down.
All tensed as the train pulled into a mothballed platform, historically used to ship weapons to war but now receiving the victims of war.
The 45-year-old Anderson and his colleagues knew there were bodies, but they had no way of knowing what else might be on board. They were kitted in full personal protection equipment and they had insisted on atmospheric monitoring gear, to test for the lethal gases decomposing bodies emit. But there was an additional gaseous risk they were unaware of - Ukrainian recovery crews had doused the bodies in formalin, a poisonous embalming fluid. Anderson explained: "This was a fairly unknown package, so we had to be cautious - we didn't know what condition the bodies were in; and we couldn't be sure there weren't other devices in any of the bags."
As retold by Anderson in an interview at The Hague in mid-   September, as the door seals were cracked, all stood back - waiting for the gases to dissipate.
He resorted to a policeman-like matter- of-factness in describing what confronted them: "There was a lot of human remains. The size of the bags and the amount of remains in each varied. Obviously we were dealing with a lot of partial bodies and I expected that, but the body fragmentation was less than I thought you'd get with an aircraft breaking up at 10,000 metres."
Under Anderson's supervision, a team of agents entered the wagons and carried the bags to the platform, where their formal documentation began.
In the absence of names, each bag was given a number and an evidence tag, which Anderson had fashioned from lengths of a specialist tape the police and detectives use to make parcels of evidence tamper- proof.
Surprisingly, Ukrainian authorities had already agreed to relinquish control of the DVI - disaster victim identification - process investigations into the crash. All this cleared the way for a snap decision by the foreign governments involved - there would be no examination of the remains at Kharkiv. The bodies would be airlifted direct to the Netherlands.
How did Anderson, the father of two late-teenagers and a 20-something, cope?
"I had to be the dispassionate professional," he told me. "The community expects us to do this work - and to do it with empathy and respect."
Then he shared an anecdote that gave a hint of how the dispassionate professional protects his own humanity, parsing the most grotesque human tragedy as evidence and prosecution briefs, not as bodies and lives.
"I remembered what a colleague said to me as we worked on the DVI operation after the Boxing Day tsunami. We were in Thailand and he'd say of the job ahead of us: 'how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time'."
So how did Anderson feel when the last shipment of bodies from the MH17 lifted off from Kharkiv on   July 26?
"That was the easy bit - in terms of eating the elephant, we had eaten just a leg. We still had a huge job ahead of us."