A SOCIAL media appeal has helped reunite Laura Bayliss with the precious ashes of her late fiancé after her suitcase was accidentally taken from a train.

Laura, from Oxfordshire, had travelled to Cornwall for the weekend to fulfil Gav’s final wish that his ashes be scattered at Holywell Bay, near Newquay.

The couple had visited the beach several times and Laura had also brought the ashes of their dogs for the emotional farewell. However, the journey took an unexpected turn when Laura arrived at Par and realised the suitcase she had picked up was not hers.

“I was expecting a moment of panic, but then I was looking on the luggage rack to try and see if mine was there,” she said. “I just went into that physical shaking feeling when I realised that it wasn’t mine and mine wasn’t there.”

Laura’s sister had picked up the suitcase shortly before the train stopped. Initially, Laura thought it was simply dirty.

“I looked at it thinking, ‘Oh, that’s a bit grubby,’ but it was really busy, so I thought somebody else’s case had probably just been on top of mine and made it dirty,” she said.

But when she picked it up to leave the train, she immediately knew something was wrong.

“Three lots of ashes are very heavy, so my case weighed a ton,” Laura said. “I was like, ‘This isn’t mine.’”

The cases looked remarkably similar, meaning another passenger had accidentally taken Laura’s suitcase. That woman had got off at Bristol Temple Meads, just one stop after Laura boarded at Bristol Parkway.

Laura’s sister then went back over the route between Bristol Parkway and Par, sharing an appeal in local Facebook groups along the way. The post spread rapidly, with people across different communities sharing it and helping to get the message out.

Laura said the response had left her overwhelmed.

“The support and the efforts people went to just to share my posts to then try and find it has just been amazing,” she said. “There have been so many lovely comments and well wishes. People can be really good when that sort of thing happens.”

The breakthrough came when the son-in-law of the woman who had the suitcase saw Laura’s post and contacted her.

“It’s just been such an emotionally draining couple of days,” Laura said. “When I saw the message from the son-in-law who’d found my post, he messaged me via Facebook Messenger and, once I picked that up, I just couldn’t believe it.”

“I called the number for his father-in-law that he provided and I was just so relieved.”

Laura, who praised the staff from GWR and Cross Country Railways, has since spoken to the woman who has her suitcase with arrangements being made for them to meet.

She is now looking forward to returning to Cornwall to complete the farewell she had planned for Gav.

“I’m just so relieved that it’s been found and that I’ll soon be reunited with it,” she said. “It’s incredible that it was found so quickly.”