A 15-month-old boy escaped with just a few cuts and bruises today after his pushchair rolled onto a railway track in Australia and was hit by a train.
Security camera footage shows the pushchair rolling over the edge of the platform in Melbourne's Tooronga station just as the train pulls in.
It was shoved a short distance down the tracks before the train came to a halt.
The baby and his three-year-old brother were being cared for by their grandmother, who told officials she looked away for a moment, and turned back to see the pushchair on the track. The elder child had apparently climbed out of the double buggy when her back was turned.
The dramatic escape came just seven months after another baby in Melbourne survived a train striking his buggy, which had also rolled on to the tracks.
Paramedic Kate Jessop said officials were amazed the child in today’s incident survived.
“It’s absolutely amazing that this child isn’t more injured than what he is, given the circumstances of the accident,” Ms Jessop told reporters. “It would appear, amazingly, that it’s nothing more than a couple of grazes and a big fright. I was assuming the worst as well and had those awful pictures in my head of a child underneath the train.”
Officials have not released the name of the relative, and paramedics said she was too distraught to talk.
The boy was in stable condition at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. He suffered some minor facial bruising and grazes to his head, but otherwise appeared fine, Ms Jessop added.
Last October, a six-month-old baby survived after his buggy rolled on to the tracks at another station in Melbourne when his mother let go for an instant.
Security footage of that escape showed the pushchair plunging off a station platform as a commuter train pulls in, and his mother’s desperate lunge to grab it. The baby suffered only a bump on the head.
PA