By Perry Duffin
Teenagers are breaking into driver cabins on Sydney trains, tampering with controls and dangling from carriages, risking life and limb for clout on social media.
One teenage boy, caught up in the escalating trend, regrets chasing the 30-second “rush” before he was slammed into a pole and almost killed on the tracks.
Videos uncovered by the Herald show groups of teenagers, sometimes masked, sometimes in school uniform, forcing open the locked doors into rear crew cabins on Sydney trains.
The teenagers, once inside the empty cabin, pull and push on the controls and blow the horn.
Most of the controls are inoperable, so the boys open the side door and lower themselves onto an access ladder.
Poles, wires, bridges and brick walls flash past at high speed – all filmed on phones by their friends.
Aiyden O’Donoghue and mum, Amie Davis, in hospital.
The teenagers jump back inside the carriage to avoid being struck. In one video, a boy’s friends shut the door while he was hanging out.
Aiyden O’Donoghue, 16, broke into cabins for more than a year before the danger caught up with him between Bankstown and Yagoona last November.
“I climbed out the steps, looked back for a second and got cleaned up by a pole,” he said.
A teenager hangs from a Sydney train in a video posted on Instagram. Credit: Instagram
“I was covered in blood … I couldn’t move this leg. I knew something was wrong with it.”
Aiyden’s right femur shattered in five places, his left ankle was broken, and he was bleeding profusely from the head.
He shared his story of surgeries, rods in bones and learning to walk again in the hope other young people won’t follow his example.
The NSW Transport Minister, Jo Haylen, on Tuesday said it was “incredibly dangerous behaviour” and there would be increased security presence across the rail network during school holidays.
“ I want to pay tribute to Aiyden, who used to make this mistake, and he is out there right now encouraging his friends, telling his friends to stop doing it,” Haylen said.
Drivers worry teenagers might trigger emergency brakes, even though main controls cannot be overridden.
“The real danger is them getting their heads smashed in and causing drama for the whole network,” one driver, who was not authorised to speak publicly, told the Herald.
Trespassers have caused more than 52,000 minutes of delay in the last year, according to Transport for NSW.
In the past five years, 20 people died and 36 were injured trespassing in the rail corridor.
Crew cab break-ins have spiked 95 per cent and “buffer riding”, in which children stand or hang off the back of trains, has increased 150 per cent over the past year, Transport for NSW said.
“We’ve seen more than 350 instances of people holding on to the outside of trains,” Sydney Trains chief executive Matt Longland said.
“It seems to be driven by social media … It’s very concerning, very dangerous.”
Police have prosecuted 218 people for buffer-riding in the past five years. Forty-two walked away with just a fine.
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