What's it like to drive a train?

For this week’s Ask Me Anything segment on Lunchtime Live, Andrea spoke to train driver Cathy Tolan.

Ms Tolan applied for the job on a “whim” when she saw online they were recruiting.

At the time, she just happened to be “looking for a change” and although the process was long, she feels the “stars aligned” eventually.

When COVID struck, she was made redundant but had an offer to start her new job just a few weeks later.

Three years on, Ms Tolan is “loving it”.

One first question came from a listener who wanted to know if you have to have a licence to drive a car before you can apply.

“I got my full licence to drive a train before I got my full licence to drive a car,” Ms Tolan said.

“You don’t need to be able to drive a car, there are a couple of drivers in my depot who can’t drive a car.”

The same listener was also keen to find out how the train is actually driven.

“In terms of accelerators and things like that, we do have three different types of control levers on our control panel,” Ms Tolan said.

“One of them is notch controller - that accelerates the train.

“The middle controller is a forward, reverse, neutral handle in the middle - it tells us what direction we’re going.

“Then, our other controller is the brake controller and dictates how heavy we apply the brake.”

A Dart light rail train stopped at Blackrock, railway station in Dublin, Ireland.

Another listener said he was interested in becoming a train driver - but only on a part-time basis.

“I don’t believe that’s a thing,” Ms Tolan said.

“I think it’s all full-time and the roster will dictate that anyway.

“It’s a great career to get into [but] the shift work can be a bit extreme and I can’t envision how that will work on a part-time basis.”

Finally, one man wanted to know if it was possible to sit up from in the train driver’s cabin.

“The short answer to that is no, unfortunately,” Ms Tolan said.

“It would be for security reasons first of all; in our driving cabins, we have such high levels of concentration, we have to be so focused.

“We can’t have any distractions in the cabin.”

Main image: A train pictured leaving MacBride station in Drogheda. Image: Anze Furlan / Alamy Stock Photo