Stopped in their tracks

DRIVER: These trains are very heavy. They take a long time to stop. A train won't go over or around you. It will go through you.

DRIVER: It's like two razor blades going through you.

PETER FITZSIMONS: At least three people every week are killed by trains. No-one knows how many near misses. No-one talks about what happens next. This is the train drivers' story.

ED JOYCE: We seen the lights coming over the hill. Seen the car accelerate and realised that she was going to race us so we threw the train into emergency brake. She lost control of the car and she skidded and she ended up coming right beside the locomotive.

PETER: Jesus. Ed Joyce has been driving trains in Queensland for 27 years. It's only when you are
next to something like this that you realise the weight, the power, the speed, the momentum, the cruel metal.

ED: That's right. There's a lot of momentum and a lot of forces to get that train up the hill.

PETER: The force is virtually unstoppable.

ED: He's doing the same speed as I was doing that day.

PETER: And the memory of the close call 15 years ago has stuck with him.

ED: The car ended up here, I'm sitting here looking down at three little kids. That's the part that... Yeah, sorry.

PETER: That's the part that what?

ED: That's the part that I saw. Still haunts me. Yeah. I just get emotional when I think about it. Yeah, as I said, half a second more, she was here.

PETER: Yeah.

ED: Half a second earlier that way, she's here and we would've pushed her a couple of hundred metres
and there'd be no kids, there'd be no wife. Someone would've lost their whole family.

PETER: And family means a lot to Ed.

ED: I'm home!

KIDS: Hey, Dad! Hey, Dad!

PETER: He has a wife, two daughters and a grandchild.

WIFE: Hey, Lillian. Lily. It's Poppy home.

ED: What are you doing, darlin'? You cookin' with Gigi?

PETER: His first job on the railway was cleaning engines in 1979. Six years later, he got his licence to drive.

ED: You're in charge of a multimillion-dollar piece of machinery and the power is unbelievable, you know. Like, if you've ever had your first V8 car and you remember what it was like. You got in there and you think, "Gee whiz, this thing's got some grunt." It's a feeling of freedom, I suppose.

PETER: Ed signed up for that freedom. He didn't sign up for the trauma.

ED: We've all had our near misses. I don't think there'd be a driver here that hasn't had someone
pull across in front of them at a level crossing. It's a mix of emotions. You go from immense anger
to immense fear in a millisecond.

PETER: Do you tighten in your guts when you just see people near the edge of the platform?

GEORGE: Oh, yeah. You do. You grab hold of your controller tight.

PETER: As I travelled around country, the one thing that was worrying drivers the most was this.

GEORGE: I don't think they realise how long it takes a train to stop.

PETER: In Perth... Jeez, I tell you what. We're moving now.

GEORGE: Yep.

PETER: ..George Pisani wants to show me.

(HORN SOUNDS)

PETER: He's hit the emergency brakes. Jeez. It takes a while, doesn't it?

GEORGE: It does. As you can see, passengers don't realise they don't get a second chance if they slip, fall.

PETER: I cannot imagine what that would be like if there was somebody on the tracks and you're just going, going, going.

GEORGE: Yeah, and you are sitting back waiting, "Stop, stop, stop."

PETER: For George, this was more than an exercise.

GEORGE: 6-9-0-1, urgent. Over.

PETER: He's been unable to stop three times - three fatalities. Must take you back.

GEORGE: It does. It brings back memories, even now. It is the injuries that you see the person has sustained and one particular one where I still see the person's face, even now when I am talking to you, I can tell you exactly what he looked like and what he was wearing. You don't forget. That, I would love to go away, but that won't and I feel for him and I feel for everybody and I feel for their families, wondering why, you know.

PETER F: How many fatalities have you witnessed personally in that long career?

PETER DRIVER: Upwards of 30.

PETER F: That must be hard to live with.

PETER DRIVER: Very traumatic.

PETER F: Peter's been a driver for 34 years and at the controls for two deaths - one at a level crossing, the other when a graffiti artist jumped directly in front of him. He couldn't stop, but copped the blame.

PETER DRIVER: His friends decided that I was a killer and they found out my name and painted it down the side of a train and had the word 'killer' written on it. Now you're in full power now?
You'll notice your amp's amping up.

PETER F: Peter's job now includes comforting other drivers who are haunted by the horror of hitting a human being. His own experiences are a help.

PETER DRIVER: Now, I want you to get into emergency. Hit the brakes. The main part is to try and convince that driver that he did all he could and it's not his fault. We get kids playing on the tracks, we get kids playing on platforms, we get kids pretending to jump, we get kids jumping pedestrian gates.

PETER F: You make it sound like madness out there.

PETER DRIVER: It is. We pay the price for that. Our nerves are shot. It damages the driver severely.

PETER F: And so many of the rail accidents could have been prevented. This man cuts it so fine,
he loses a shoe. The boom gates are coming down, the lights are flashing, but you're late for work or school. Why not make a dash for it? And once you get through those gates, you've got just seven seconds before 180 tonnes of cruel and unstoppable metal comes bearing down upon you. Likely, you will die horribly. And even if you survive, what's left of your life will be changed forever.

JONATHAN: Next thing I remember was waking up in hospital on a life support. When the doctors took me off the life support, that's when they told me that I'd been run over by a train.

PETER: Jonathon Beninca is one of the few who has lived to tell the tale. What he lost is a sobering lesson.

JONATHAN: So, now I open my hand. Open, close. See how that moves? I lost my right arm above the elbow. I lost my middle and index finger off my left hand. But, as well that, they told me that my right leg had been amputated as well.

PETER: Jonathon was 19 and a fool. Trespassing in a Sydney rail yard, throwing rocks at a carriage.

JONATHAN: One of the rocks that I threw, it actually rebounded back and hit me on the side of the head. It hit me that hard, it fractured my skull and knocked me out. I was face down in the middle of the tracks. My arm was over one side of the tracks - my right arm - and what the doctors seemed to think is that when the train ran over my arm, I had some sort of fit or convulsion and that's how it got my leg and it got my fingers as well.

PETER: Just want to go a little bit faster. This locomotive simulator is a window into a train driver's experience. If I see anything trouble, I hit the brakes, hit that, pull on the anchors. My train is 2km long and travelling 80km/h. I can see something well up ahead.

INSTRUCTOR: What is it?

PETER: Looks like, it looks like a car. A car is in the middle of a level crossing. OK.

INSTRUCTOR: That's all you can do.

PETER: That's all I can do. I can blow.

INSTRUCTOR: Yep.

PETER: Nothing else I can do? I can't hit reverse, I can't do anything?

INSTRUCTOR: No. Can't do anything.

PETER: No handbrakes, no nothing. Get out of the way.

INSTRUCTOR: Everything is locked up.

PETER: It looks like we're gonna hit unless they move. Unless they move. Get out of the way. It's 800 metres since I hit the brakes. Nothing, nothing, nothing! Get out of the way! This is not a simulator. This is a horror movie.

PETER DRIVER: It's almost like a heart attack. Your chest pounds, your head pounds.

PETER F: There are miraculous escapes. This woman and her baby survived. Oh!

ED: Unbelievable. This bloke's a fool.

PETER: There are also the reckless and the stupid. This guy is the luckiest...

ED: He is the luckiest man alive, mate. He needs to win the casket. He's just won it twice.

PETER: Then there's the suicidal. 150 people every year are throwing themselves under trains.
When they take their own life, they don't realise what they're doing to the lives of the men and women who hit them.

PETER BULL: I saw her just jump in front of the train and it was like slow motion. It all...

PETER F: Peter Bull has been getting people to and from work in Sydney for nearly three decades.
He also carries with him the memory of that young woman who jumped in front of his train.

PETER BULL: I could hear them screaming on the train and I thought to myself,"I wonder if she is alright" and I've got up and opened the door and it was like a meat market. It was just horrific.

PETER F: The particularity of your job is you go past exactly that spot many, many, many, many more times.

PETER BULL: Nearly every day.

PETER F: How do you recover from something like that?

PETER BULL: I think you've just gotta, you just keep going. You think about it sometimes but you can't dwell on these things. They'll take control of you. None of us are ever trained for what we see or feel.

PETER F: In the past, drivers have carried the burden without help. Many walked away. But now, a national foundation, TrackSAFE, has been established to help. Drivers are offered counselling after accidents. Despite the horror they face, it surprised me that every driver I met still loved their job.

PETER BULL: A train driver. I think it's one of the best jobs in the world. You haven't got a boss standing over you. You got no-one standing over you,except for your wife on pay day. Every corner's a surprise. And if you get from A to B without any surprises, you've had a good day.

END