A woman walked away from back-to-back life threatening situations Wednesday when her car careened off Highway 1, then landed upside down on a busy set of train tracks.

"It's like a nightmare," said one CN police officer at the scene. "You're OK after your car flips over and then you realize you're on a track and a train's coming."

According to police at the scene, the lone occupant of a four-door sedan was driving westbound on the outside lane through Dallas when she and the lone occupant of another car collided while one of them changed lanes.

The crash caused the woman to drive off the highway, across a grassy buffer and onto a set of train tracks where her vehicle flipped and landed on its roof perpendicular to the rails.

Trains travel at 90 kilometres an hour through that stretch and it can take as much as two kilometres to stop.

But an eastbound CP train came to a stop just in time to avoid plowing into the car after RCMP calls to CN Rail police gave the engineer enough notice.

It was less than 150 metres away when it arrived at a full stop.

The woman was taken to Royal Inland Hospital with unspecified injuries, but she was able to walk to the ambulance. The other driver was not injured.