“I had the hope that the bus would move forward”: the story of the TER driver at the Millas trial



“JI didn’t think, I activated the emergency brake […] I had hoped that the bus would move forward ”: the trainee driver of the TER collided with a school bus in Millas (Pyrénées-Orientales) in 2017 testified Tuesday in Marseille. Six schoolchildren on board the bus were killed and seventeen were injured, eight of them very seriously. The bus driver, Nadine Oliveira, 53, has been on trial since Monday for homicide and involuntary injury in Marseille.

“The barriers were closed, the bus arrives a fraction of a second later. I see him push the barrier, twist it, I tell myself that he is going to step back, to notice it, except that I see him advancing weakly, ”described at the helm Marilyn Vandeville, 40, who was at the controls of the train. having hit a school bus at a level crossing on December 14, 2017. “It never stopped, it continued at low speed, I stayed on this image”, she added, describing her “feeling helplessness”.

The shock was inevitable

“When I saw that the bus was pushing the barrier, I said to myself: what is he doing ? I didn’t think, I applied the emergency brake and I whistled,” she said. “I whistled for a long time hoping that the bus would accelerate and clear the way, all of this happens very quickly, the shock was inevitable and very violent”, added Marilyn Vandeville, who was alongside her driver monitor in the cabin. . “My colleague got up to throw himself into the airlock [situé derrière la cabine] just before impact,” she recalls.

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“I stayed whistling” until the impact “because I had the hope that the bus would move forward”, insisted the driver, then in training, who was driving for the third time on this TER line linking Villefranche- from Conflent to Perpignan. “I remember exactly where I hit. For me, I saw a silhouette and the rest of the bus was empty, ”she adds. “With the sirens, the helicopter, we understood that the bus was full of children”, adds the driver, herself a mother of two children, who says “no longer celebrate Christmas as before”. “We never forget anything, we live with it,” concludes Marilyn Vandeville, still an SNCF driver.




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