KEY POINTS:
Bereaved mother Cathy Turner is delighted and relieved white crosses have not preceded new automatic safety gates installed at two pedestrian crossings on Auckland's western rail line.
The Wellington safety campaigner, whose 15-year-old son Michael was killed by a train on his way to school in Hutt Valley five years ago, says she is gratified Ontrack provided the new gates before any other parent lost a child on either of the Auckland crossings.
"It's a final chapter for me because these have gone in before _ instead of after _ anyone died," she told the Herald, while preparing to come to Auckland for a ceremony this morning marking the $45 million duplication of railway tracks between Henderson and Swanson.
Michael Turner, who walked in front of a train while staring at the ground at a crossing at Silverstream, would be celebrating his 21st birthday next week if he was still alive.
A coroner said he believed the teenager, who was preparing for an exam, would not have died had he been confronted by a physical barrier.
His mother, sharing that belief, spent two-and-a-half years pressing rail authorities to install the country's first set of automatically closing gates at the scene of his death.
A second crossing has since been equipped with automatic gates, paid for by the Upper Hutt City Council, but the Sturges Rd and Ranui railway stations will be the first in Auckland to offer such safety features for pedestrians, at a cost of $120,000 to $150,000 a set.
Ontrack initially planned to build pedestrian bridges over the two sets of railway tracks, ready for an increase in train movements from July to four an hour in each direction at peak times.
But after communities took fright at the large size of a footbridge built at Glen Eden during an earlier duplication stage, the Government agency held public consultations to find the best alternative safety solution.
Mrs Turner said the Silverstream gates had worked without any untoward incidents since being installed in 2005, although with the help of a white cross in Michael's memory as a chilling reminder to pedestrians to respect them.
She said the Sturges Rd crossing was similar to Silverstream because of large numbers of students heading to and from five nearby schools.
Waitakere College deputy principal Chris Poland said there had been several close shaves involving youngsters getting too close to trains near the station over the years, and the school would be encouraging its students to use the gates properly.
Ontrack spokeswoman Jenni Austin said the gates were paid for as part of the 5km rail duplication project between Henderson and Swanson in the Government-funded $600 million upgrade of Auckland's basic rail network.
She said Ontrack preferred "grade-separation" measures, such as footbridges, where possible but acknowledged gates "might be one of the options" considered for other Auckland upgrades.
Ms Austin said some form of footbridge would still be needed for the Swanson Station at the end of the duplicated tracks, because trains stopping there would sometimes block a temporary pedestrian crossing. She said community consultations were still working towards the best solution.
Waitakere Deputy Mayor and Swanson resident Penny Hulse said she was confident of an acceptable solution short of the "post-modernist disaster" of the Glen Eden footbridge.
Although a bridge at Swanson would have to be the same height, for rail electrification lines to run underneath, she believed elevators would avoid having to replicate the 90m pedestrian ramp, which was the most intrusive element of the Glen Eden bridge.
