WATCH: Angry commuters attack train driver mom’s cabin
The drivers too often get the blame for a decaying and inconsistent railway network.
A train driver from Birchleigh and a metro guard from Vosloorus were attacked by furious commuters in separate incidents on Tuesday, reports Kempton Express.
The commuters were fed-up with the slow Metrorail trains and attacked the two single mothers, both members of the United National Transport Union (UNTU), said Sonja Carstens, spokesperson for UNTU.
“The two traumatised sole providers of their families fear for their lives every day when they leave home to work for the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa), the operator of Metrorail,” Carstens said.
Thomina Mashiangsko (39), a train driver from Birchleigh in Ekurhuleni, told Steve Harris, general secretary of UNTU: “I would resign today if I had another plan to earn a living. It hurts me that I don’t know if I will return home to see my children (15) and (3).”
Warning: Rude gesture in video.
Octavia Zondo (33), a metro guard from Vosloorus, says her mother prays that she will return home alive every day.
“I am so afraid to go to work, but if I don’t, my family will have nothing on the table to eat. I provide for my daughter (13), my mother and my little sister,” she told Harris.
Mashiangsko was en route from Johannesburg with an overcrowded train on Tuesday evening when she realised one of the commuters standing between the coaches had broken one of the cables. She managed to continue with the faulty train to Elandsfontein Station where a female technical worker was waiting to fix the cable.
“I pulled in on platform 2. The commuters realised there was something wrong. I tried to explain to them but they started stoning my cabin. The technician got into the cabin from the other side.
“We were hiding in the cabin for more than an hour listening to the commuters stoning the cabin, threatening to kill us. I called for Protection Services to come and help me but they never came,” says Mashiangsko.
She even tried to take a video to scare the commuters off but that did not help.
She has been a train driver for the past 17 years. She works on manual authorisation because the signalling system is out of order.
In December she was booked off on stress leave and went to see a psychologist.
Zondo was en route from Johannesburg when the train got stuck at Cleveland Station, where they had to wait for manual authorisation. The commuters managed to bulldoze the door of her train driver and assaulted him badly.
She fled the cabin and ran to the N2 highway where she waited an hour for Protection Services to assist her.
This was the third time Zondo, who has been working for Prasa for three years, was attacked.
