The second death happened about three years into his driving career. He went right on working. There was no counselling offered and, at the time, drivers were reluctant to take leave as work compensation payments only covered about 80 per cent of their wages. ''It was like you were being punished for what happened so there wasn't much encouragement to have a lot of time off in those days,'' Smith says. During his career, Smith has been involved in three fatal accidents and another in which a woman lost both legs. The divorced father-of-five and grandfather-of-14 has proved more resilient than others but he says one death in particular, that of a 17-year-old boy, has never left him. ''That knocked me around a bit that one,'' he says with understatement. ''It just never goes away, it's always there. You think you switch off to it, but there's always things that bring you back to it.''

International research has found that up to 16 per cent of drivers who experience a ''person-under-train event'' develop post-traumatic stress disorder and more than 30 per cent develop other mental health issues, including depression and anxiety disorder. Melbourne University's Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health found drivers exposed to these events had twice as much time off work as other drivers, one year after an incident. Five veteran train drivers who spoke to The Age about the traumatic events they had witnessed and the impact they had, all said that at the beginning of their careers they had no idea, and received no warnings, about the frequency or impact of rail accidents and deaths. The acting director of policy and service development at the Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health, Andrea Phelps, says the more people are prepared for traumatic events, the more resilient they may be. ''They can enhance their reserves and know what to do and how to deal with it if it occurs,'' she says.

Figures obtained exclusively by The Age reveal a person dies nearly every week on Victoria's rail network, mostly as a result of suicide. But V/Line driver Michael Hinch believes the death toll is closer to one person every day. Hinch witnessed his first death when he was a trainee driver aged just 17. For more than three decades, during which he was involved in five other fatalities and 17 major accidents, he blocked out the death. In counselling sessions, when asked to write down his fatalities, he would never include the first he had seen or recall the screams of the senior driver calling ''red light, red light'' - words reserved for emergencies - as the train bore down on the man in 1976. Then one day he found himself driving through the same location. He peered out the windscreen and found he was no longer looking out the window of a modern VLocity train. The long dormant memory surfaced and suddenly he was looking down the long front of the train he had been in 33 years earlier and the man was again about to die in front of him. ''It's suddenly all flooded back and I could see it like I was looking into a TV set,'' he says.

A counsellor told him the experience was a normal response to a traumatic event, as are the nightmares that plague him and many other drivers. Phelps says that when speaking with train drivers, she has been particularly struck by their feelings of powerlessness as they are forced to watch a fate unfold that they cannot change. ''They know what's going to happen but they can't do anything to prevent it because of the time it takes to stop a vehicle so you've got all of that time, which might only be a matter of seconds but often feels as though it's a lifetime, when you know what's going to happen but you can't do anything about it,'' she says. Tim*, a 30-year rail veteran, says apart from applying the emergency brake, unlike in a car, there is little evasive action a train driver can take. Tim has been involved in two fatal accidents and a number of level-crossing car accidents. He knows a colleague who has witnessed 14 deaths.

He says the trauma experienced by drivers is often heightened by the time lag between when a driver realises they are about to be in a collision and the actual impact. Former train driver James* describes it as time slowing down. ''Sometimes it seems like minutes before it does and you never forget it, it's always there,'' he says. When James began working on the railways, aged just 17 in the early 1970s, fatalities were never discussed. Later, when he began to witness deaths and accidents, he found a macho culture in which train drivers carried their burdens without tears or talk to be oppressive. ''You couldn't be seen to be weak. If something like that happened and you were having problems coping with it, the managers would just say, 'Get over it, don't worry about it' and that was the way it was,'' James says.

''You couldn't be seen to be weak with your workmates because the first thing they'd tell you is, 'Well, so and so, he's had 10 and he's had 13 and he's all right, what's wrong with you?' '' The stress was too much for James' marriage, which disintegrated after four years and the birth of his son. ''I just started getting snappy, had trouble sleeping, got very angry and I couldn't understand why,'' he said. ''I didn't want to do things. I'd just go and find a hole to crawl into and it just destroyed the marriage.'' He moved to the city for a fresh start and began new relationships, but another accident would happen and the pressure would again begin to build. Eventually he left the industry and has since been diagnosed with a serious mental health disorder. He can't say how many deaths and near-misses he witnessed during 30 years working on the railways.

''The more it happens the more memories you get with the noises and so forth and it's compounded throughout your career.'' He thinks he saw five people die, but his memory is no longer reliable. Every morning, he leaves his breakfast dishes in the sink so he knows he's eaten and forgets addresses he has visited countless times. If someone asks him what he did at lunch, he not only can't recall, he has no memories to grasp that will prompt others. It's like trying to complete a crossword puzzle without the clues. But at night the memories return. The sounds of screams and screeching brakes and thoughts of the dead person's final moments steal his sleep. Paul* knows the torment of the dark and quiet hours. He had his first fatality after nearly 30 years as a train driver last October. His already red-rimmed eyes fill with tears and redden further when he talks about the day the train he was driving hit and killed a three-year-old boy in Wallace, near Ballarat.

''You think about it at night times, they are probably the worst. That's when it normally comes back to haunt you,'' he says. Paul could not speak when he realised his train had hit the local boy who had wandered on to tracks from a nearby backyard. Incredibly, a four-year-old girl playing with him survived unscathed. Another train driver happened to be travelling on the train at the time of the accident and checked on the children while Paul's emotions imploded. ''I thought, 'I've just killed two kids' and it was, I just can't describe the grief you feel,'' Paul says as he sheds more tears. The second driver was stunned to find the girl up and moving, but the boy's condition was grave.

Then Paul was told the boy was alive and with paramedics. Relief washed over him but it lasted only a moment. ''All I could think about was the little boy,'' he says quietly, after stopping for a moment to gather himself. ''I knew the girl was OK … the little fella … I thought there might have been some hope for him.'' The boy later died in hospital. A V/Line internal investigation has cleared Paul of any wrongdoing. He is still waiting to hear if he will have to give evidence at a coronial inquest. Counselling has helped, but the tragedy has taken its toll on him and his family, particularly his 80-year-old mother. Yet he knows the boy's family is enduring unimaginable pain.

Paul returned to work three weeks after the Wallace accident but now drives on a different line after the constant trips back to the accident scene became too much to bear. There was a time when he did not think he'd ever be able to look at a train again. He would crouch behind fences to avoid seeing or hearing one pass. But the railways are in his blood; between himself, his father, sister, aunts and uncles, his family has clocked up 140 years in the industry. Other drivers inundated Paul with cards and messages. ''They all said you've got to get back to work. And that's from guys who've been through similar incidents - because if you don't get back, you fall into an even deeper hole and that's not good for your psychological health long-term,'' he says. In the 1970s, the suburb of Braybrook, in Melbourne's west, was filled with railway families living cheek by jowl in a supportive and tight community. ''In those days, there was an unofficial committee, if you had a fatality … three or four blokes would come down to your house that night with a dozen bottles of beer under their arm,'' Hinch says.

''They'd kick the wife out, they'd sit you down, they'd pump beer into you until tears came out and they'd say, 'You're all right chap, back to work tomorrow'.'' The railway communities have long since dispersed, but the drivers believe peer-to-peer counselling still has its place and should be offered to those who feel more comfortable talking to an experienced colleague than a psychologist about their experiences. Back in 2007, a state government rail suicide working party, set up by Victoria's then department of infrastructure, recommended ''suicide proofing'' railway stations known to be fatality hot spots. But it seems little action has been taken since the working party's chairman, Terry Spicer, warned that if nothing was done to reduce rail deaths, drivers might start suing for the trauma they had endured. ''Ultimately, it is likely that an occupational health and safety case will be made for failing to address or mitigate a known hazard, particularly in the case of train drivers who are the people who are most involved, first on the scene after a collision with the individual intent on suicide and most affected by trauma,'' he said in 2008.

''In extreme cases, drivers are traumatised to the point of being unable to return to work.'' Liberty Sanger, a principal at Maurice Blackburn in Melbourne, says if a driver ''in the course of their employment suffers a psychiatric injury and it was reasonably foreseeable that a psychiatric injury would result by the failure of their employer to do something, or the act of an employer'', then they could have a case. The drivers who spoke to The Age do not want more compensation - since 2008, drivers receive automatic compensation payments from the Department of Transport after a fatality - they want fewer deaths. They are sympathetic to the families and loved ones of those who have died on the railways, both accidentally and deliberately. They feel sadness at the complacency around trains that has caused the deaths of some and compassion for those who have felt so desperate they have chosen to end their own lives.

They want people to remember that trains involved in accidents are made of more than metal. ''Don't think of it as a train or a machine. It's a driver, not just a train,'' Paul says. Loading For help or information visit beyond blue.org.au, call Suicide Helpline Victoria on 1300 651 251, or Lifeline on 131 114. * Names have been changed