Rail Staff: Do you have nightmares about the job?

[OneTrackMinded]

There seems to be a commonly shared experience amongst many drivers of nightmares about various situations like SPADs, skipping a station, crashing into the buffers, brakes failing, etc.

Just wondering if any of you here have your own personal stories to tell about nightmares/dreams you’ve had about the job.

I’ve put “rail staff” in the title just in case this expands to other roles like guards.

[Wasn’t sure if this should go in the discussion section or the railway jobs section - move if required]

 

[styles]

I only briefly worked lineside.

The night after my very first experience walking in the 10ft way, I had a nightmare about seeing a polar bear in the same space. I woke up before I found out what happened!

Reminded just now of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago. Two teenagers got on a train after winding up a middle aged man on the platform. The train doors are set to close, then the man shouts something from the platform. One of the teenagers shouts something back and presses the doors open button, but because it's the guard who is closing the doors (rather than timeout), then continue to close. As she leans forwards to shout the abuse, she falls off the train. The train quickly starts moving and well, there's a gruesome bit at the end.

Not sure what prompted that dream as I hadn't experienced that sort of behaviour any time recently!

For context, I don't even work on the railway, just use it a lot.

 

[saismee]

My first few weeks on gateline I kept having dreams where I could hear the barriers beep and hear the ticket transporter whir. Those repetitive sounds got to me a little! I've even walked up to someone after their ticket was rejected and asked to see it while I was travelling for leisure... that one was unfortunately not a dream!

 

[dk1]

Yes of course. Had them all my working life and still do in early retirement.

 

[Segedunum]

When I did gateline I had a fair few about rocking up at the wrong station or being on an endless commute to work where I was running very very late.

In a similar vein to @saismee I was once chatting to someone on a gateline at an old company when I'd since moved to a role behind the scenes - someone without a ticket showed up and I started the spiel that would proceed a Penalty Fare before steering myself towards "and my colleague will talk to you about this..."

 

[paulmch]

I've always had nightmares about work, even before I joined the railway. When I was a guard I had dreams about trapping people in doors, giving two on the buzzer against a red signal, etc. Now that I'm a driver I have SPAD dreams all the time, and a really common one is something will happen that means I have to put the emergency brake in, but for some reason I just can't move the lever far enough and the train just keeps going and going. Sometimes I think I should claim the overtime for it!

 

[Port Road]

I've been retired for 10 years now and occasionally still have bad dreams about work, usually along the lines of letting a loaded coal train out right in front of a Pendolino.....or is that a memory....

 

[Acey]

When working as a driver,never but since I retired frequently ,mainly spads and slip-sliding away !

 

[Harpo]

My chemistry teacher always said, read the exam paper first, the sub conscious will start working on it in the background. In my railway life, I often woke in the night with ideas and answers because of it.

Since then I dream of bad outcomes from all the times I was dropped in at the deep end, back before ‘training’ became a railway thing and JFDI* ruled.


* Just do it.

 

[johntea]

I work in IT infrastructure (not on the railway but a 24x7 reliant industry) and often get similar nightmares, like every single system has decided to go down at once or similar!

In reality I've been doing it since 2007 and thankfully never had such an incident but there have been some that have come close! (I didn't have 'someone deciding to nick the air conditioning unit powering the server room over the weekend in the middle of summer' on my bingo card for example!)

We often joke in the office that we fancy a new job in the garden centre or similar!

 

[Giugiaro]

I work on rolling stock maintenance. Once I was having a dream during surgery where a batch of skirts for our coaches came with incorrect sizes.

One month later, at the same day of the week and at the same hour I was going through the procedure, what happens?
You've guessed: A batch of skirts for our coaches came with incorrect sizes.