One of the friends of dead train driver John Kennedy has paid a heart-warming tribute to him.
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Train enthusiast Clive Williams would sometimes travel with him in the cab talking about matters great and small, particularly about their shared passion for trains and rail travel.
He said that among other nice character traits, Mr Kennedy was an animal lover who always tried to avoid hitting vulnerable wildlife on the track even in a locomotive weighing more than 50 tonnes.
On one occasion, he couldn't stop the train in time to avoid hitting a female kangaroo, but he got out of the cab and found that her joey was still alive.
He picked the frightened young orphan up and took it with him in the cab to pass on to an animal rescue centre.
"He was very humane. He was a good man," Mr Williams said of his deceased friend.
Sometimes he just couldn't halt the fast-moving train and worried that he might have killed an animal. There was the time he spotted a vixen and her cubs in the middle between the rails.
"There was a fox and six cubs and he grimaced and said he hoped he hadn't hit them."
Mr Wilson and Mr Kennedy were both keen on improving the line between Canberra and Sydney.
Mr Wilson said he once did the 344 kilometres between Tashkent and Samarkand in two hours.
The journey between the two Uzbek cities is longer than the 247 kilometres between Canberra and Sydney but takes half as long.
He also said that when he rode in the cab with the deceased driver, he would buy a ticket.
It was about doing the right thing and not wanting to deny the train operators of a fare - but also if the train couldn't complete the journey and he had to get a bus for the rest of the ride, the ticket would be needed.
Mr Williams also wrote in Monday's The Canberra Times that Mr Kennedy had felt uneasy about the fatal route.
"John advised me to make my stuff secure and said I would need to hang on because some sections were very hair-raising, with quite violent sideways movement.
"He said that the XPT track was under-maintained and he had half-expected to come off the rails on his first few trips."