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Last summer, Sarah attended a baby shower for a friend in Montreal. The taxicab took her by the scene where the accident took place. It looked familiar, she recalls, but at the same time so foreign.

The accident occurred in the early hours of Dec. 8, following Sarah’s Sunday-night waitressing shift at the Irish Embassy Pub & Grill on Bishop Street. She was in the St. Charles neighbourhood of a friend, trying to find her way back to her apartment in St. Henri. She took a popular but illegal shortcut through the train yards.

Stepping between parked freight cars, Sarah tripped on the track, and fell in front of an oncoming train.

“It looked like my legs were flying,” she recalls, “but I think it was just me being dragged by the train, away from them. I saw them detach and fly off my body and land in the snow. I thought it was just my feet; I got new Uggs two days before that.”

She was thrown into a ditch between tracks. The train continued on. It was about 2 a.m. and -14C out. She didn’t look back at her legs; the sight of blood makes her sick, and she thought she might faint. Unfortunately, her purse, with her cellphone in it, had flown off with her legs.

Adrenalin kept the pain at bay. The cold kept her from bleeding out.

“I was looking around, figuring that something was going to happen, someone was going to stop and run over. It wasn’t like I was in the forest in the middle of nowhere. And then I thought, ‘It’s dark. It’s really dark and I’m in a ditch.”