Miracle survival: Woman's 'unbelievably stupid' leap onto freight train

FIRST ON 7: Police and train drivers say they are amazed by a video obtained by 7News showing a woman jumping from a station platform on to a passing freight train.

The woman survived despite slipping between carriages and having a train weighing thousands of tonnes pass over her.

On Wednesday 28th December, 2011, just after 11pm at Springwood Station in the Blue Mountains, two friends were waiting for the last train home when a freight train appeared.

It rumbled through the station between about 15 and 20 kilometres an hour.

The pair watch the train and have a discussion before she does the unthinkable - she jumps onto an open carriage.

From one angle you cannot tell whether she has landed safely.

Her friend looked shocked as he paced the platform, not knowing if she survived.

The reason is obvious when the train finishes passing through the station a minute later.

The woman is lying motionless between the tracks, and her friend feared the worst.

Finally she moves, rolling over and getting back on her feet, and unbelievably she is alive, and walks over to the platform as another witness offers help.

Bleeding and shaken, she is treated by paramedics and taken to hospital while police piece together what happened.

They conclude by looking at two different angles of the CCTV that she jumped and fell between the carriages.

She then managed to not only keep herself between the tracks but also underneath the bottom of the passing carriages.

Officers were stunned by what they describe as her stupidity, and the fact she survived.

They could have charged her but chose not to.

"This girl has probably learned a lesson the hard way, she could have been killed or seriously injured," Detective Inspector Mick Bostock said.

7News understands she needed stitches in her head and back, but was released from hospital the next day.

"It's an offence for someone to touch a passing train or attempt to touch a passing train, so to actually try and jump on a moving goods train is very reckless and i wouldn't recommend it," Mick Bostock said.

Amazingly, this story has a happy ending but so many others that are like it do not, and it is the innocent train drivers who are left to pick up the pieces.

Dave Mathie has driven trains for 40 years, and says the odds of surviving this are next to none.

"I am absolutely stunned that a) anyone would consider doing that and then having done it survive it, that just takes my breath away," he said.

"[Chances of] survival would be a million to one."

Mathie says dealing with suicides and incidents like this are the worst parts of his job.

"I have got to say that the two that I have been involved in, you don't think about it every day but you do get flashbacks," the Rail, Tram and Bus Union's Dave Mathie said.

It is a pain that can take a lot longer than a few stitches to heal.