Train drivers quit over deaths on tracks

Two Tranz Rail train drivers have quit their jobs, unable to cope with the horror of their trains hitting and killing people.

Peter Esler, of Upper Hutt, ended his 24-year career as a Tranz Rail driver this year after his sixth fatal crash in 12 years.

One victim was a 12-year-old boy and another was from a family he knew.

Suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, Mr Esler has been unable to get back behind the controls of a train since. He even refuses to ride in them as a passenger.

"Six was six too many," he said. "Had it happened again, I would have gone bloody mad."

Though he initially believed he could cope with what was generally accepted as a "work hazard", they had become an increasingly intolerable nightmare that robbed him of sleep for many a month, he said.

"The first was the worst, but they don't get any easier," he said. Mr Esler's final crash was in March.

After six weeks' sick leave, he was given a desk job but left Tranz Rail on medical grounds in October.

Brownie Bristowe, also of Upper Hutt, has been involved in two fatalities in three years.

The first was a 19-year-old girl who was lying in the middle of the tracks under a railway bridge near Woburn. The second was last December, when a man in his mid-20s was killed in almost the same spot.

"It is a terrible thing to do, to kill someone. It's bloody horrible but you can't do a thing about it," he said.

Soon after the second fatal accident, Mr Bristowe witnessed another train death. That was when he quit.

"I was so scared it might happen to me again, that the next time I might hit a child."

He was on sick leave until he left the company in September.

Another Lower Hutt driver was known to have been involved in four fatalities. A South Island driver was involved in five deaths in five weeks - a week after he returned from a fortnight break, his train hit and killed a sixth person.

Tranz Rail spokeswoman Sue Foley said 16 trespassers, including people who committed suicide, had been killed by trains so far this year.

Three more had died in 26 level-crossing collisions with trains. Thirty level-crossing accidents happened last year, well down on the 1996 record of 47.

No figures were available last night on how many drivers had left because of fatal accidents.

Last week Tranz Rail urged motorists to take extra care at level crossings after a truck driver was killed when he collided with a coal train near Christchurch. A few days earlier, a mid-Canterbury man suffered serious chest injuries when his vehicle hit a freight train south of Ashburton.

Last month, a Waikanae woman died when her car collided with a train at Te Horo, north of Wellington.

In July, a Hawera train driver was devastated at discovering his de facto wife was the driver of a car killed in a level-crossing collision with his locomotive.

Tranz Rail launched the Rail Safe programme this year. The company also works closely with the education programmes of the Land Transport Safety Authority and Transport Ministry.

- NZPA