The incident was caught on camera from the driver’s cabin – see the footage below.
It appears the rider was attempting to push his bike across the bridge when he saw the on-coming train and fumbled his bike. After desperately attempting to get his bike off the tracks the rider makes the life-saving decision to leap from the tracks as the train smashes into the bike.
In a radio interview, the driver, Colin Sharp said the group of riders were only about 50 meters from a proper crossing. The train was travelling at 160km/h when the driver saw the riders. He applied the emergency brakes but still passed the group of riders at 147km/h.
The area is off-limit to the public and the riders should never have been there. The driver returned to the scene to find nothing left of the bike and the rider and his mates were nowhere to be found.
