Man uses train to amputate his leg

A MAN who amputated his withered left leg by laying it on a railway line in front of a locomotive said last night that he had no regrets. His leg was severed above the knee.

'It is the end of six years of suffering,' said Ian Hudson, 28, who was crippled in a motorcycle accident six years ago and then had 20 operations on his leg. But, despite surgeons' efforts to help him walk properly, the former landscape gardener was forced to hobble along on a special boot, a calliper and crutches.

In some pain, but sitting up in bed at the Royal Hampshire County Hospital, Winchester, yesterday, Mr Hudson said: 'I knew exactly what I was doing, even to building up piles on stones on either side of the track to rest my leg on. I feel so relieved now it is done.

'I am now going to get an artificial leg and I will be able to get around and even run in time - and I've not been able to do that for years.

'No one else knows the pain I had and what I went through over the last years. Now it is sorted out once and for all.'

Neighbours said that Mr Hudson had been heard screaming the night before that he could not take any more. He is thought to have left the home he shares with his girlfriend in Winnall, Winchester, and walked down to the main London railway line at St Cross, which had been closed for maintenance by a Railtrack crew. He was hit at 4.30am by an engineering train that was bound for Southampton.

A doctor at the Royal Hampshire Hospital said Mr Hudson would have avoided bleeding to death because the crushing injury to the leg would have created a major trauma. After initial heavy bleeding, his body would have automatically shut down the arteries in the leg to reduce the bleeding and protect the major organs such as the heart.

The emergency services are understood to have arrived quickly enough to prevent further heavy bleeding. Later, in hospital, he was given emergency medical treatment and placed under heavy sedation.

Mr Hudson's mother, Patricia, 55, of Stanmore, Winchester, said: 'He has never come to terms with being crippled and his leg caused him a lot of pain. Ian must have got to a stage where he could no longer cope. His leg was very, very deformed.'