Salary of tube and train drivers - why so high?

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Hawkwind1879 said:
Some of the comments here have to be a joke surely:confused:

Most train companies do recruit off the street if there are no suitable internal applicants. You see driver vacancies all the time.

Train drivers absolutely deserve their pay, they go through months and months of training and constant monitoring throughout their career.

They get paid so much for their knowledge of the route and traction and I'm afraid it is a highly specialised role that not everyone can do (I wish I could =p)
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I love the idea that, doing your job, and knowing about your job and doing training is treated like some kind of abnormal thing that suddenly deserves massive pay.

The training is simple, most jobs require you to train(to some degree, a lot don't have much training, but thousands of jobs have huge amounts of training). It's a few months of, press this button if Y, and do this if X and this makes it go forwards, this makes it stop, and red lights mean stop mkay.

It's not being a doctor, it's not several years of medical school and presumably... you actually get paid while training as it's you know, a job.

A doctor is highly specialised, does maybe 10 years of training all told and many people will be unable to pass that training. A train driver is not highly specialised, a few months of basic training that almost everyone on earth could complete doesn't make it a difficult job. It's not like they go for 3 months training and only a few come out the other side with newly gained knowledge of quantum physics and chaos theory. It's stuff no one else needs to know, but you do need to know to do the job, that doesn't make it complex or difficult.
 
Mark M said:
Interesting thread and I can see both sides of the discussion. A friend of the family used to be a tube driver and had someone jump out in front of him and its virtually ruined his life. He cant sleep, is half the weight he used to be and is a shadow of his former self. He went through all the counselling that was offered but said it was of little to no help for him.
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Could the same not be said of HGV drivers or bus drivers that have run over someone?
 
Freefaller said:
Having to deal with cyclists, taxis and idiot drivers - I'd say it is at least equivalent or on a similar scale of effort as a tube driver.
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also, passengers, money, etc. A train driver has no need for direct interaction with passengers while a bus driver does. Also, as a train driver absolutely no one will ever cut into your lane from the side, you won't deal with road rage.

You don't need perfect reactions to avoid crashes, you won't have dozens of people a day rush out across the road in front of you. Roads have thousands of cars, buses, lorries and other obstacles along the side of the road that can hide from view people who will suddenly walk across the road. The environment that bus drivers work in is dramatically more dynamic and almost infinitely less predictable.
 
drunkenmaster said:
I love the idea that, doing your job, and knowing about your job and doing training is treated like some kind of abnormal thing that suddenly deserves massive pay.

The training is simple, most jobs require you to train(to some degree, a lot don't have much training, but thousands of jobs have huge amounts of training). It's a few months of, press this button if Y, and do this if X and this makes it go forwards, this makes it stop, and red lights mean stop mkay.

It's not being a doctor, it's not several years of medical school and presumably... you actually get paid while training as it's you know, a job.

A doctor is highly specialised, does maybe 10 years of training all told and many people will be unable to pass that training. A train driver is not highly specialised, a few months of basic training that almost everyone on earth could complete doesn't make it a difficult job. It's not like they go for 3 months training and only a few come out the other side with newly gained knowledge of quantum physics and chaos theory. It's stuff no one else needs to know, but you do need to know to do the job, that doesn't make it complex or
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It is specialised, just shows you don't know anything about driver training or the railway.
 
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Mark M said:
Sure, but I believe there is much higher risk of it happening on the tube.
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But in reality, like 95% of people who die on train tracks commit suicide, 95% of people who die on the road are accidents and people who don't want to die.

So number of kids being killed on crossings is for instance dramatically higher than those being killed in front of trains. Train drivers know almost every single person that gets killed.... wanted to be killed, many might have incurable cancer, be older and be dying anyway. With road deaths, that isn't the case, either through your own fault or not someone's life was probably ended way before their time. That is mentally much harder to take, also as a train driver, people jump in front of a train at the point there is NO CHANCE to stop, again on the roads this is not true nearly as often.


It will be dramatically easier to live with hitting someone in a train who wanted to die when you had literally no possibility to prevent it, than hitting a kid when you could potentially have prevented the accident.
 
I don't know much about trains, but I know for example the Knowledge takes one hell of a lot of planning, revision and learning and I don't hear Taxi drivers making 60K a year in london.
 
It's far too high, and the reasons have already been mentioned herein: unions, closed shop, etc.

My OH is a midwife and a very good friend is a paramedic. What they deal with in terms of responsibility, working hours, general public, risk etc is far and beyond anything a train driver has to deal with and for half the pay (almost at most).

A good day for my friend is 'only' having 3 people die on his watch, and similarly to the nurse here by OH gets 3 weeks notice for shifts, all of which are 12 hour days (8am-8pm or 8pm-8am).

Of course they signed up for that and knew what to expect like any job, but the same goes for tube drivers too.
 
I wonder how much they'd be paid without the Unions?

I've never worked in a unionised role, but have worked in companies where the workers were covered by a union (GMB in that case), often a lot of the workers earned more than the management team. That in itself is fine, they put the hours in and work hard and deserve to be well paid. However, anytime they cocked up, or managers wanted to apply changes or try different processes/items - the unions would kick up a fuss, because people knew they'd earn less. How is a company supposed to innovate/improve if unions block attempts to make the workplace more efficient/better?

I'm fully on board for protecting the work force and not letting the big wigs exploit the workers, but at the same time the business/operations need to be run.

I wonder if there is a little greed attached in this case? I don't resent the drivers earning 60k, as I said I wouldn't want to do the job, but with the levels of automation, sensors, modern tech, I don't think they'll be able to command much more of a salary in the future, so may have made a rod for their own back....
 
drunkenmaster said:
The training is simple, most jobs require you to train(to some degree, a lot don't have much training, but thousands of jobs have huge amounts of training). It's a few months of, press this button if Y, and do this if X and this makes it go forwards, this makes it stop, and red lights mean stop mkay.
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LoooooooL, it's not a toy train set, I think you should go back to the GPU section and talk more rubbish.
 
Fair pay for the concentration needed IMO

If your working day is as full on as a tube drivers and you aren't getting paid as much then I think you are being underpaid.

I get about half the wage but I'd also say out of my 8 hours at work half of it is spent doing very little :P

People compared hgv driversI I totally agree that some hgv drivers should be paid similar . But then them being underpaid is why there is a shortage at the moment !

From friends experience s it's easier to pass your hgv licenses than to pass the apptitude tests for a train driver role
 
Freefaller said:
A lot of tube drivers don't live in London. and 60k is plenty for London.



Suicide - probably, but injury and fatality via accidents is higher outside of the train network I would have thought, no?
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exactly. and that deserves paying for. tube drivers don't accidentally kill anyone so don't need any thought into trying to make it not happen other than when they see someone they think will purposefully jump in the way. as an HGV driver, the chance of steering into a biker and killing them is real.

I assume the cost is very high, but why don't more tube stations have the full barriers on the stations that open only once the train has stopped?
 
Fairly sure the answer is no said:
I assume the cost is very high, but why don't more tube stations have the full barriers on the stations that open only once the train has stopped?
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Some cost but most likely disruption of closing a tube station for a long and sustained period of time (rather than odd night/evening maintenance works). Every new station I've ever been to all over the world uses full-height glass barriers.
 
Don't think it really matters....it's probably the easiest form of transport to automate so they'll all probably be out of the job within a decade or two.
 
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