Train surfer who lost legs speaks out
Mike O’Rorke was a young man living a wild and exciting life. All that was destroyed in an instant when he fell off the back of a train while ‘‘train surfing’’.
He broke his back in the fall, and was run over by the following train, which severed both his legs.
‘‘I was 19 and had my whole life ahead of me,’’ he said of the July 1987 accident.
‘‘I was just starting to live life and it was really starting to be something. I am lucky to be alive, but this is not the life I had planned for myself.’’
The Paraparaumu man, now 47, spoke out after two young men were filmed ‘‘surfing’’ on the back of a train near Manor Park station on the Hutt Valley line on Sunday.
‘‘The risk involved for a moment of fun, or a good time, is no comparison to how your life can be destroyed,’’ he said.
‘‘When you are young and take risks, you never think about the impact your actions will have on others.’’
He had surfed on the back of trains many times, and thought he was bulletproof.
The night he almost died began with beers after work in Petone. He and two mates then wanted to make last orders at the Clyde Quay Hotel. ‘‘It was my favourite pub and was closing down.’’
The three men boarded a Petone unit about 5pm. They did not want to pay and got into an argument with the guards, after which they were ejected.
O’Rorke walked on to the tracks at Kaiwharawhara station and jumped on the back of the 5.30pm from Paraparaumu to Wellington.
Just before 7pm he lost his grip, broke his back in the fall and lay unconscious in the path of the next train.
The driver saw the body on the track and applied the emergency brakes, but rolled over him.
O’Rorke woke up in hospital 31⁄ months later, paralysed from the waist down. ‘‘In the end it didn’t matter I lost my legs. They would have been useless anyway.’’
He said he wished he could go back and tell the wild young bloke he used to be that he should have paid for a ticket.
‘‘I’m not sure I would have listened,’’ he smiled. ‘‘Young kids don’t like listening to old people.’’
These days, he still enjoys a beer or two on a Friday night, but he knows his life is ‘‘so much harder than it was supposed to be’’.
He is grateful to be alive and declares he is fortunate. ‘‘I have a house and a car and I am pretty happy.’’
But he is looking for work, as fulltime jobs are hard to find when you are in a wheelchair and missing two legs.
He plays chess for the Kapiti Chess Club and still rides the trains to get around.
But nowadays he sits inside – and ‘‘mostly’’ pays the fare.