Gerhard Hanetseder, aged 39, and his 12-year-old daughter Christina had just managed to get into the very back of the train as it left the valley station shortly after 9 a.m.
"We were the last people to get a place, and crammed into the lowest part of the carriage", he said in radio and newspaper interviews.
The first sign of the disaster came before the train entered the tunnel, with a seemingly harmless remark by another skier: "There's something like smoke over there." It was not yet taken seriously.
As the train entered the tunnel, Hanetseder looked back from the passengers' compartment to the lower driver's cabin. The cabin was unoccupied as the train was going uphill.
Through the plexiglass window, he saw a small, hesitant, flame. Christina beside him, also noticed. "Look, Papa, something's burning down there," she said.
Before the passengers realized what was happening, the train had come to a halt.
"The light was still on inside the carriage, the doors were closed. Suddenly there were streams of smoke and they became thicker. There was hectic movement, first panic."
"I tried with others to force the door open, but it could only be opened by a crack. A child close to me was crying. Sudenly I saw with horror that the driver's cabin had started to burn fiercely."
Hanetseder said that someone tried to use a mobile phone to give an alarm to the valley, but the contact broke off. There was coughing and more cries as the smoke blotted his fellow passengers from view.
"Someone smashed a plexiglas window with a ski, a hole the length of one's arm, no bigger. I knew we had to get out, otherwide it would all be over."
He grabbed his daughter, lifted her up and pushed her out on to the track in the tunnel. Then he squeezed through himself. He heard an older man calling: "Down - for god's sake, down. There's fire further up!"
But only a few followed the call. The rest fled upwards to their deaths.
"Seconds after I was out, the whole train went up in flames."
"Other people trying to save themselves going down the stairs called to us to crawl over to them, because the stairway was there."
"We managed it, and not too early. Just afterwards the cables we had been clinging to caught fire. Flames went through whem with hissing noises. It was like an electric shock."
Christina kept calm, turning again and again to see whether her father was behind her on the metal steps. They climbed down and down to the distant, saving point of light at the lower end of the tunnel 600 meters away.
Hanetseder said: "I turned around again, and the train was only a ball of fire. Then I knew it was an unimaginable catastrophe, that no-one else would get out."
Running with them was a man crying repeatedly in panic: "It's crazy, it's crazy."
When father and daughter finally reached the lower tunnel entrance, both with bruises, and cuts on Christine's face, they kept on running automatically, right down to the valley station.
"If the carriage had broken loose and come down, we would have been killed despite everything," said Hanetseder.
What came afterwards was virtual normality - a first medical check in an emergency tent, a call home to wife Renate and son Alexander, aged 14, to say they were safe, a brief visit to the hospital, and then the ride home to Gallspach in Upper Austria Province.
Hanetseder recounted his harrowing experiences in interviews with the Linz daily Oberoesterrichische Nachrichten, the mass-circulation Vienna Kronen Zeitung, and Austrian public radio ORF.
In his last moments in the train, "I was convinced my life and my daughter's were over. I thought of my wife and my son at home."
But two days afterwards, he said, Christina had "coped with it very well psychologically." She fully intended to go to school on Monday as usual.
Monday's interview was the first word of Austrian survivors. Previously it had been assumed that all 12 who escaped were from the German state of Bavaria.
(la/dpa)
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