A life back on track
Jennifer Short had less than a five per cent chance of survival as she lay in a hospital bed with split organs and broken bones.
That her heart was still beating after the initial impact of a freight train crashing into her tractor was a feat in itself.
The Manawatu¯ teenager had been baling hay on her family farm near Halcombe on March 18, 2012, when she drove over the private rail crossing.
The collision ripped the tractor apart – and Short along with it. Her pelvis was broken in 15 places, as was her tailbone, pubic bone and foot.
Almost every organ was punctured by rogue bone fragments, her right lung collapsed under several broken ribs and her bladder was torn.
Short, who was Jennifer Hughes at the time, underwent 24 hours of surgery. For three months, she was held together by a metal brace.
Following recovery and rehabilitation, she was walking again. And now, in spite of the emotional and physical scars, the 23-year-old is running, climbing and paddling.
Short ran a half marathon in Feilding on November 4, having just completed an Outward Bound adventure.
‘‘I’d always wanted to do Outward Bound ... I wanted to do it even more after my accident, to prove to myself that I was capable of doing it.
‘‘Before my accident, the drive wasn’t there as much.’’
Though she still endures an inoperable leg injury, where the muscle is detached from the bone, she refuses to use it as a crutch, and was determined to be treated like everybody else at Outward Bound.
‘‘I couldn’t use my injuries as an excuse not to do an activity, and not telling them was probably the best thing that I did.’’
The outdoor course pushed Short to her physical limits, completing pursuits such as kayaking rocky Marlborough Sounds rivers, tramping for days on end in treacherous conditions and scaling walls blindfolded, left her with a sense of ‘‘delayed gratification’’.
Her perseverance extends to working on the farm, where she returned to driving tractors only a year after the crash.
‘‘I thought ‘you have to get back into it’,’’ she said. ‘‘It wasn’t the train’s fault, it wasn’t the tractor’s fault.’’
But she’s still haunted.
Short couldn’t face walking across a train track until last year.
‘‘I still can’t walk across a double railway yet. I just have this dream where I get stuck in the middle.’’
Her father, Paul Hughes, watched it unfold in the rearview mirror of his ute.
Hughes, a volunteer firefighter, lifted his daughter from the contorted tractor, thinking she was dead.
‘‘It’s not nice when you deal to your own,’’ he told the Standard after the crash.
‘‘I did talk to her, I said ‘squeeze my hand if you can hear me’. She only did it once and I thought it was all over.’’
The uncontrolled crossing was without bells or barriers when the 500 metre long, 1000 tonne freight train, travelling from Wellington to Auckland, ploughed into the tractor.
Kiwirail spokesman David Gordon said train collisions usually occur in high traffic areas, and were uncommon on private crossings. But given trains could not swerve, the results were often fatal.
‘‘Trains are heavy and fast. They cannot stop in a hurry. In fact, a fully laden freight train can take up to a kilometre to stop.’’
New Zealand Transport Agency spokesman Andrew Knackstedt said 13 people had died in train accidents in 2017, with 78 deaths in the last five years. They did not keep records on collisions where there were survivors.