Alarm bells
Pedestrians tuned in to their music and oblivious to approaching trains are dying in increasing numbers, writes Dileepa Fonseka.
Sometimes you just want to stop the train, get out and shake people by the shoulders and say ‘do you realise what you just did there’? Yolanda Kruger
Yolanda Kruger was all alone in her cabin when she spotted him. Beanie on, earbuds too, near Mt Eden station at a crossing standing right in the middle of her tracks waiting for another train to pass on the opposite track. She doesn’t remember his face or much about what he looked like, she tries not to, because in 15 seconds his life would, for all intents and purposes, be over.
Kruger was less than a year in the job.
Collisions between trains and people have risen four-fold between 2010 and 2017, but those between trains and cars have decreased by 45 per cent in the same period. Train accidents are changing with the times. Now it is no longer the archetypal car on the train tracks at the wrong time that is most at risk, but the podcast-listening pedestrian.
After an accident, colleagues call you up, Kruger says, even if they don’t personally know you very well because everyone’s been through it before. Counselling and time off are not optional, they’re mandatory, three days off at a minimum. Every train driver is affected by death, they can imagine themselves in that position and are concerned about how you’re doing. Nobody wants you to return to work too soon.
Kruger got off lighter than most, she couldn’t bring herself to get out and look at the body, so she doesn’t have an image in her head of the carnage a freight train can wreak on flesh and bone.
‘‘Some people are so shocked by it they never drive trains again.’’
The hardest part of the whole experience was telling her parents what had happened. Her family left South Africa for the same reason most do, crime and death, the prospect of which haunted her even when she was inside her airconditioned office in Johannesburg working as a legal secretary.
In New Zealand, her father placed her on her current path, after circling a job ad for the role of a train conductor on a passenger train one day after Kruger had exhausted all avenues to find work as a legal secretary .
She didn’t need any New Zealand experience to become a train conductor as she would have as a legal secretary. She didn’t even need to have travelled on a train, which was a good thing because she had only ever ridden on one twice in South Africa. In her own words she ‘‘had nothing to do with them’’. All she needed for what would be her first job in New Zealand was a willingness to placate irate customers and wear a smile in the face of their criticism.
Kruger says she enjoyed the job and the customers, despite a laugh after she talks about the latter that might seem to indicate otherwise. She says her decision to become a train driver was about moving on to the next step but admits the solitude and opportunity to remove herself from the immediate demands of commuters appealed to her.
A train driving job promised that: just her, the scenery and the tracks.
She was the only woman in her class of four. Now that she is all trained up she is the only female train driver in Auckland and one of eight across the country, out of a nationwide pool of 385 train drivers.
‘‘I love working with the guys, there’s no office gossip and stuff going around. Sometimes they can be hard work, but generally I enjoy working with them.
Kruger admits there were issues at the start with older men who doubted her ability with engines almost as soon as they saw her.
‘‘I just had to keep smiling and pretend, yeah, I’m good!’’
Those same men were the ones who supported her through the ordeal of the accident. In the hours afterwards, the victim was rushed to hospital and put on life support while her boss gave her a ride home, she poured herself some tea, and sat there, processing what had just happened and waited till she found a way of telling her parents.
In the end, she settled for printing out a news story on the accident for them. After they had read it she simply told them, ‘‘that was me’’.
Rail Safety Week starts tomorrow and KiwiRail is drawing attention to an increase in the number of pedestrians nationwide who were hit by trains and died. But the number of fatalities doesn’t tell the whole story as the number of nearmisses recorded by KiwiRail has risen even more.
Part of this is due to better logging of such incidents by KiwiRail, but a good percentage of it are people who simply appear distracted and almost step into the path of a train.
The vast majority of such nearmisses are in the metropolitan centres of Auckland and Wellington, with Auckland taking the lion’s share of 64 out of 105 near-misses nationwide.
According to Dave Gordon, general manager asset and investment at KiwiRail, it is hard to pin down why there are more deaths at certain spots than others, except than to say that the risk is much higher in urban areas. KiwiRail has its own ranking of track spots by risk, but it doesn’t correlate with crossings most people think of as dangerous for pedestrians, such as Auckland’s much-criticised Morningside station.
‘‘Morningside, it is unusual, but it seems to have attracted incidents which seem to be disproportionate to the objective standard of risk and I don’t really understand why.
‘‘There have been fatalities there, absolutely.’’
Auckland Transport says it has upgraded seven crossings for pedestrians in the past five years and had plans to close four and upgrade 13 more of them in an attempt to improve pedestrian safety, but Gordon says the solution is not to look at the crossings but the behaviour that causes the accidents at them.
Kruger drives her train through metropolitan Auckland five days a week and admits she breathes a sigh of relief when she passes Papakura on her way out of the city on her regular route transporting freight from Auckland to Hamilton. It’s one of the reasons why she prefers to drive trains alone; passengers are too much of a distraction.
She tries to focus on every potential obstacle, and in Auckland, there are a lot of them. She describes her body tensing up as she approaches a passenger platform where people routinely try to touch trains as they pass through, and the children who jump in their direction before stopping themselves a few centimetres short.
‘‘Sometimes you just want to stop the train, get out and shake people by the shoulders and say ‘do you realise what you just did there’?’’
Kruger has never learned the identity of the person involved in the accident at Mt Eden station. But she admits that in the week he was on life support before he died, she rang up the hospital to ask about his status.
‘‘It wasn’t my fault, but it’s still somebody’s child or parent, every time I go over the same crossing I think about it, I’ll always remember it.
‘‘It’s scary out there.’’