UK - One man's delay is another's final journey

[John Ashworth]

One man's delay is another's final journey
By Jim White
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 05/05/2008

The train had just left Witham. It was Sunday, so inevitably, thanks to engineering works, we had just spent an hour on a rail replacement service (what you and I might call a bus) from Ipswich. But now we had an uninterrupted run into London. It would take about 40 minutes, reckoned the train manager, who was sitting opposite us in the carriage, programming his ticket machine.

Or at least it would have done, if, somewhere near Hatfield Peverel, there had not been a dull thwack against the bottom of the train, an inanimate, hollow thump on the metal work. We braked hard, jerkingly hard. And the train manager looked up from his work and said: "I don't like the sound of that."

He rang the driver on his mobile.

"I thought it was," we heard him say. Then he turned to us: "I was right. We've got one under."

A total of 194 people committed suicide by jumping in front of trains last year. Already in 2008 eight people have died on the line between London and Ipswich, adding to 12 who were killed on it last year, statistics which make the Essex rail route the transport equivalent of Bridgend. Some of the deaths there have permeated the national consciousness. Natasha Coombs was hit by a train near Manningtree in mysterious circumstances in 2006. A month later, her mother Joanne, unable to cope with her loss, committed suicide close to the spot where Natasha's body had been found.

Last month Katie Gumble and Dean Pickard were killed by a train near Harlow Mill. Footage taken from CCTV cameras suggested the pair had been arguing as they crossed the track, pulling at each other, apparently oblivious to the imminent arrival of the London express.

They are experienced in this sort of thing in Essex and, with a practised efficiency, a plan of action fell into place. The air ambulance arrived, the police were there within five minutes, the driver could be seen walking along the trackside, peering under the train. Some engineers turned up after half an hour, in their hi-visibility tabards and safety helmets, to check for damage. The train manager stayed aboard and took charge of passing on information to the passengers. He thought, he said, he would leave the clearing up to the experts.

We were there for what seemed an age, insulated from the grim business going on below. The train manager made his way through the carriages, offering his mobile to those who didn't have one. He was surprised, he said when he came back, that only one out of the 105 people on board had demanded a form for compensation payment.

"To be fair, that's probably because it's a Sunday," he said. "Jumpers usually choose Monday morning, foul up the whole rush hour and that really annoys the passengers."

When I got home, four hours later than planned, I tried to find out who it was who had despaired of life so much that they had gone to Hatfield Peverel station on a Sunday lunchtime, walked out on to the track and stood there waiting for the next train. But I found nothing. A week later, there has still been no mention of his death, in local or national newspapers, or on the internet. He has simply passed into statistics, his end causing no more ripples than a minor inconvenience for 100 or so travellers.

It was also a major shock for the driver, the unwitting, unwilling, uninvited facilitator of his death. As we waited last Sunday for things to be cleaned up, titbits of information were fed to us by the train manager. The driver, he told us, had seen the man standing on the track with his arms outspread, waiting. Despite applying the emergency brakes, he had been unable to stop. The man had looked him direct in the eye as the train had hit him.

As is proved by the hopeless box office performance of Three And Out, the lame McKenzie Crook film about rail suicides, this is not a laughing matter. Winston Churchill revealed in his memoirs that he was almost overwhelmed by the urge to leap in front of a train every time he encountered one. Unable to cope, more and more of us appear to be succumbing to that Churchillian compulsion.

Statistics suggest that since that man died at Hatfield Peverel, another three people will have met their end in the same way. And another three drivers will be consequently traumatised; etched for ever in the recesses of their mind the fact that they have killed someone. It is something I'll bear in mind next time I'm tempted to tut intemperately at the announcement of "lengthy delays due to person under train near Edgware Road".

telegraph.co.uk