Woman stuck on railway crossing in front of speeding train gets 18 months in prison

A regional court in Brno has sentenced 49-year-old Elena Prostinaková to a year and a half in prison over an incident at a railway crossing in June 2025, when her car narrowly avoided colliding with a high-speed train travelling at 160 km/h.

According to the court, the woman thought she could make it across the crossing in time but misjudged the situation. Rather than smashing through the barrier — designed precisely to stop cars in such cases — she began making strange manoeuvres right on the tracks. It was the train driver's own alertness that averted disaster: spotting the car on the crossing, he slammed on the brakes, buying the driver a few precious seconds. That was enough for her to swerve the car clear, with the train passing just centimetres away.

"What made you drive onto the crossing?" asked Judge Hana Kleinová. "I was rushing to work," the defendant replied.

The court of first instance found Prostinaková guilty of recklessly endangering public safety and handed down a suspended sentence. However, the Brno appellate regional court overturned that ruling on Wednesday and sent the woman to prison instead. The decisive factor was that just six months after the incident, she was caught drink-driving in Uherské Hradiště — a breath test showed 1.33 per mille of alcohol in her blood.

"I was at a party and just wanted to move the car to another parking spot," she explained in her defence.

Presiding Judge Kleinová explained that since Prostinaková had committed another deliberate offence — drink-driving — just a few months after the first incident, a suspended sentence was no longer an option. "I would have welcomed a suspended sentence, I still have small children," the woman pleaded with the court, to no avail.

The prosecution pushed for real prison time, arguing that the endangerment of public safety had been committed deliberately rather than recklessly. "Her argument that essentially nothing happened and that she managed to dodge the train anyway doesn't hold up. It was simply a survival instinct, an attempt to escape the situation," the prosecutor said.

The woman's lawyer disagreed: "If she hadn't panicked, she could have driven through — the barrier was still rising. But she stopped. This couldn't have been intentional; otherwise we'd be talking about an attempted suicide — she would have had to knowingly accept driving straight into the train's path."

In the end, Judge Kleinová concluded that the woman's actions could not be classified as intentional, since she had been trying to get out of the situation she found herself in. "She did not intend for the train to hit her. Nevertheless, she behaved with utter recklessness and indifference to the consequences. It was only by chance, and because the driver started braking, that she managed to get off the tracks," the judge concluded.

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Source: novinky.cz