As she backs The Northern Echo's bridge safety campaign, train crash survivor Pam Warren tells Lindsey Jennings about her fears for rail passengers and what it would take for her to get back on a train.

FOR months, the protective plastic mask which covered the burned features of Pam Warren was a symbol of suffering. It was a constant reminder of the unimaginable carnage that was the Paddington rail disaster. Thirty-one people died on October 5, 1999, three of them in a fireball which tore through the wreckage after the impact. Pam was almost the fourth.

More than two years later, at her home in Reading, Berkshire, Pam, 35, is without her mask. She apologises for not wearing any make-up, and you can only wonder at the remarkable job the mask has done in preserving her face. There is barely any sign of scarring. The only obvious indicator of the years of trauma she has endured are a pair of black gloves which hide the injuries Pam received when she put her hands over her face to protect herself from the inferno which engulfed the train.

Pam, a former financial services consultant, was on a London-bound inter-city train when it hit an oncoming commuter express at Ladbroke Grove. She was sitting in the carriage behind the fuel tank when the impact happened, just after 8.11am. Around 6,000 litres of diesel turned into a fireball which caused heat so intense that layers of Pam's skin peeled away.

Many members of the Paddington Survivors' Group, which Pam co-founded, are still undergoing traumatic surgery, and dealing with the aftermath of the disaster in the form of post traumatic stress disorder. But Pam says there is one thing which keeps her going in the fight for better rail safety - fear.

"We have opened a few doors and have made rail safety generally very public," she says. "We feel that if we don't do that, who else is going to? We genuinely fear for people catching trains at the moment. At the same time, we have to balance that with making a recovery and wanting to get on with our lives. We didn't want to be on that train that crashed, we're living with the aftermath and it's really difficult to come to terms with that.

"Campaigning for safety has helped give us a purpose, particularly when you're at your lowest and you don't know what you're going to do. Overriding all that is the fact that we've become more informed about the behind-the-scenes of the rail industry and the things we have learned are frightening. The short cuts that are being made, things like neglected road bridges and the old signalling systems. They made such a hash over privatisation that it will take years to put right, and that's if they act straight away."

One of the highlights of their campaign came in December when the group held a Rail Summit, bringing together the Government, the rail industry and the unions to focus on cementing the safety recommendations made by Lord Cullen's inquiry into Ladbroke Grove. But Pam says there has been disappointment since.

"One thing we've been appalled at is that all these people who said 'yes, we're going to do this and get our rail into the 21st Century' started buck passing and saying 'it's going to take longer than we thought'. All the old arguments started up."

For someone who was an ambitious career woman, it is extremely frustrating for Pam to see problems and not tackle them in a methodical way until they are solved."I was very much brought up on the ethos that, if something lands on your desk, you knuckle down to the work and sort it out," she says. "Stephen Byers has made many promises about how he is going to tackle the rail industry and get it back into some semblance of order, but against that, they all came to our rail summit and they all signed our declaration and, since then, we've heard nothing. The old practices are still there. There's no sense of urgency. We're talking about people's lives and if they're not killed, which causes enough devastation, then you're talking about potentially maiming people and their lives are going to be affected for ever. You can never give them back what they had before."

For Pam, the dark moments still come in the middle of the night. She continues to take sleeping tablets and will need more operations on her hands, mainly to make them more aesthetically pleasing because "they look as if they've been sewn on". The burns on her right hand were so severe her finger tips were amputated.

'Most of the drastic work has been done," she says. "But I'm having to learn to live with things. I used to be right handed but now my left hand dominates. I have no feeling in my right hand so I have to be careful I don't go burning myself or cutting my hand when I'm cooking."

She laughs, which lessens the shocking topic of the conversation. Her outlook is upbeat, but there is a sense she continues to battle with the horror of that fateful day and exhaustion is never far away.

"It is a struggle," she admits. "I am frustrated. It's over two years and my body still won't keep up. I can't go through a whole day without having a sleep in the afternoon."

Her life now is a direct contrast to before the crash, when she would work weekends and often until 10pm on weeknights. She says her horrific physical injuries pushed any mental trauma to one side while she focused on healing.

But it was not for long, and she later found herself replaying the crash, and having flashbacks, which still occur. They range from quick glimpses of the past to physically feeling as if she is back in the grip of the fireball on the train. But she has managed to find some peace in relaxing pursuits such as yoga and horse riding. She has also had the devoted support of husband Peter, who is 20 years her senior.

Will she ever go back to using rail travel again? Perhaps, she says, if standards can be brought into line with places such as Holland. Recalling a trip there, she explains: "Even before the crash, when I wasn't thinking about rail safety, it struck me how much cleaner and more punctual they were and how the safety systems were better, and I just can't see why we can't have that. If we were running a Dutch or Swiss system I would get back on the train.

"I would just like to see some frenetic action going on, the work done on the signals, rail tracks and bridges. I don't see how renationalising would be feasible but I think we should renationalise the responsibility. Perhaps we should have the Government responsible for the tracks, signalling, and the infrastructure, and the companies which run the trains have to pay a premium to the Government to run their trains on that system. Basically, Railtrack should have stayed with the Government."

Standing on her mantelpiece is the Woman of the Year Frink Award, which is given to mark the accomplishments of women with a disability. Pam remarks how humbled she was to receive the award, rubbing shoulders with the likes of television news reader Moira Stewart and actress Maureen Lipman at the glittering awards ceremony in London in October. She tells of others who would have been far more worthy recipients. "I don't consider myself to have done anything special," she says. "I just survived."

But she has done more than just survive. She is a remarkably brave woman, who has probably done more for rail safety than she ever imagined.