Aslef boss Mick Whelan: My horror at finding child’s body on train track
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The secretary of the Aslef trade union has spoken for the first time in an interview about the death of a child who stepped onto electrified tracks in front of his train.
Mick Whelan was driving a North London Line train between Camden Road and Caledonian Road stations in 1991 when a boy “under the age of seven” touched the 750 volt live rail while playing on the tracks. After suffering a heart attack, the child died in an ambulance on the way to hospital.
Speaking about the tragedy, Mr Whelan told The Telegraph: “Quite simply, I was driving the train on a Sunday on the North London Line. And I hit something.
“There was a smashed scaffold board,” he recalled. “So kids have been on and about the track, seeing what a train would do if you put a scaffold board across the track.”
After stopping the train, Mr Whelan and the guard got down onto the tracks and began checking for damage.
“Unfortunately, when we got halfway down the train there was a young child, under the age of seven. Looked like he was asleep. He had stood on the third rail and been electrocuted.
“At that point, the child was still alive so we did what we were meant to do, we closed all the lines and we called the emergency services.
“They came, they took the child away, and we were subsequently informed some days later that he unfortunately passed away on the way to hospital.”
The boy, whose identity has not been disclosed, had stood on the third rail which carries a 750 volt electric current to power the trains.
“I had two young kids at the time,” Mr Whelan, 64, continued. “You go home and hug your kids that bit tighter.”
‘You think you’re going to get the blame’
He recalled that one of the first police officers on the scene had asked him how fast the train was going when he hit the boy, but that he “hadn’t hit him at all”.
“Again, you think ‘they’re going to blame me for this’ or whatever. You go through the whole emotional rollercoaster,” he said.
Although drivers today are given mental health support if somebody jumps in front of their train, in the 1990s things were different, Mr Whelan recalled.
“Basically it was a very macho male-dominated industry; you get back on a horse you fell off of,” he said.
“Some people had a fatality of whatever nature and never drove a train again, never came back. Others had two or three in their career and seemed to be able to get on with it.”
Mr Whelan was called to attend the child’s inquest.
“About a year later the guard and I had to go to the inquest at St Pancras. And on the day they put us in a little waiting room with the family. It was that crass,” he said.
“I’m sitting there in full railway uniform, right. I’m the driver, the guard’s there in uniform with the people who want the answers to what happened to their child.”
Mr Whelan was elected head of Aslef - the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen - in 2011, and one of his early priorities as leader of the union was to get coroner’s court rules changed so rail staff no longer had to testify in person at the majority of fatal accident and suicide inquests.
New rules were issued in 2013 after Mr Whelan met Peter Thornton, the then chief coroner, to discuss the impact of being called to give evidence in person after a fatal incident.
With inquest hearings taking more than a year to be convened at the time, he said: “Reliving the event 18 months afterwards isn’t a good thing for the drivers to come to terms with.
”But if it was clear who, where, when and how - which is what an inquest is set up to do - you didn’t have to physically cause the driver to give evidence.”
These days Mr Whelan holds a seat on the Labour Party’s governing National Executive Committee and earlier this week he met Louise Haigh, the Transport Secretary, to present her with demands for a 10 per cent, £6,000-a-head pay rise for Aslef members.
The trade unionist has spoken just once before about the child’s death, for an all-but-forgotten 1992 public information film called Killing Time.
Network Rail said that there were more than 19,000 trespass incidents last year alone across the country’s 20,000 miles of tracks.
Accidental deaths on the tracks have declined to an all-time low, more than halving from 49 a decade ago down to 20 fatalities last year.
Suicides have increased, however, rising to 276 fatalities in financial year 2023-24 – an increase of 17 per cent – although they remain below 2014’s high of 286.
Rob Wainwright, head of level crossings and public safety for Network Rail, said: “As the holiday season approaches, we are once again asking parents to ensure that they and their children know all about rail safety so they can behave responsibly when they are in a rail setting. Help us to get everyone to where they want to be safely and on time this summertime.”
