PERALIYA - Just inland from the crashing waves on Sri Lanka's palm-fringed shores, the train slowly came to a stop on Thursday -- marking the moment a deadly tsunami hit 20 years ago.
Sri Lanka's Ocean Queen Express became a symbol of the biggest natural disaster to hit the South Asian nation in living memory, when the train was struck by the giant waves of December 26, 2004.
About 1,000 people were killed -- both passengers and local residents, who had clambered inside desperately seeking shelter after the first wave hit.
After they boarded, two bigger waves smashed into the train, ripping it from the tracks and tumbling it onto its side more than 100 metres from the shoreline.
Each year since then, the Ocean Queen has stopped on the tsunami anniversary at the spot in Peraliya, a sleepy village some 90 kilometres south of the capital Colombo, to commemorate those killed.
Survivors and relatives of the dead boarded the train in Colombo early in the morning before it headed south with national flags fluttering on its front and then slowed to a creaking halt in commemoration.
Villagers came out, the line was closed and a few moments of quiet settled.
Mourners offered flowers and lit incense at a beachside memorial for 1,270 people buried in mass graves, with Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim ceremonies held.
The 9.1-magnitude earthquake off the western coast of Indonesia's Sumatra island triggered huge waves that swept into coastal areas of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and nine other nations around the Indian Ocean basin.
A total of 226,408 people died as a result of the tsunami according to EM-DAT, a recognised global disaster database. Of those, 35,399 were in Sri Lanka.