A woman using a Tom Tom satelite navigation system has sworn off sat-nav systems forever after almost being wiped out by a train. Now police are warning that all sat nav devices are not infallible and that people should use them with due caution.
Satellite navigation systems have sent many frustrated drivers down the wrong road, but Paula Ceely’s gadget was more seriously misguided according to her.
For her sat-nav directed her straight on to a railway line where she was almost killed by a speeding train. Luckily the 20-year-old English girl managed to leap clear of the train just seconds before it ploughed into her Renault Clio at over 100klm an hour.
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And now she has owed never to rely on the instructions of a sat-nav ever again. Miss Ceely told how she was using the machine to travel 200 kilometers to visit her boyfriend’s parents home for the first time.
Just a few miles from their destination, she was directed into a country lane, just as night fell.
The student said: “I thought the sat-nav knows where it’s going – so I just followed the directions it was giving me. I drove up to a large metal gate but the sat-nav insisted it was the correct way so I opened it and drove through.” When she got out to close the gate she heard the sound of a train’s horn and looked down to see she was standing on railway tracks. She recalled: “I just had time to get out of the way as the train slammed into my car and carried on down the tracks. “The train missed me by inches – I thought my number was up.
“I gasped in horror when I saw the empty spot where my car had been parked.” By then her beloved Renault had been carried almost half a mile down the track by the speeding Swansea to Pembroke Dock passenger train.
Miss Ceely, a second-year student at Birmingham University, said: “I put my complete trust in the sat-nav and it led me right into the path of a speeding train. “The crossing wasn’t shown on the sat-nav, there were no signs at all and it wasn’t lit up to warn of an oncoming train.”
She said yesterday: “I’ll never use a sat-nav again. You rely on them and if it all goes wrong, you’re horribly stuck. “People should be more careful with them – you never know where they might lead you.”
British Transport Police were yesterday investigating the accident at the level crossing. A spokesman said: “Sat-nav systems are not infallible and we would advise people to use them with due caution.” Earlier this year a survey found that more than four out of ten drivers who have used a car satellite navigation system have got lost or delayed.
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The research study found that a quarter of the drivers who had problems with their sat-nav subsequently used the system less, or not at all. The findings followed a series of high-profile cases in which motorists faithfully following their sat-nav systems have found themselves sent along obscure and unsuitable roads, drenched in fords or rivers, or trapped in impassable narrow lanes.
One UK Council has resorted to putting up road side signs warning drivers to ignore their sat-nav systems.
At this stage there is no evidence that the Tom Tom device was at fault.
