Train driver at the railroad: a job at crucial levers

For many, the job is a childhood dream. But what is the everyday work of a locomotive driver? Axel Wolf and Sebastian Präkelt can still be enthusiastic about the job today – despite the shift work.

Deutsche Bahn transfers him something around 2400 euros every month. “It’s not more than that,” says Axel Wolf, a train driver with 30 years of professional experience. But Wolf didn’t choose the job to get rich either. For him, the job of a train driver was above all a great opportunity. Being outside, constantly getting to know new colleagues and bearing responsibility is the nice thing about his job. He dreamed of this as a child.

As adolescents, he and his brothers wandered to the tracks on the outskirts of Berlin, let trains rush past them and at some point decided to become a train driver. Axel Wolf and one of his brothers succeeded in saving the childhood passion into adulthood.

Abandoned the Abitur

In 1986, Wolf drove a train alone for the first time. At that time he was 18 years old and had just finished his apprenticeship at the GDR Reichsbahn. “I still love the job today,” says the 53-year-old. After many years of work, routine creeps in, of course, but there are always special moments. For example, when the ICE between Frankfurt and Cologne accelerates downhill from 230 to 300 kilometers – entirely without the power of the engines, but only through the steep gradient.

He could also have graduated from high school, says Wolf. The teachers were for it, but a career at a desk seemed too boring to him. “As a train driver, you are at the crucial levers.” A sentence that unfolds an ambiguous force in the days of train drivers’ strikes. “Colleagues who clean the toilets in the trains do not have our power, but the trains could not run with clogged toilets either,” says Wolf.

Working in shifts is part of it

It is part of everyday life for train drivers to work in shifts, which can also fall into the night. “Anyone who becomes a train driver knows in advance that he is working in a shift system,” says Sebastian Präkelt, a 32-year-old train driver who drives regional transport in Berlin and Brandenburg and, like his colleague Wolf, is a volunteer GDL official. For him, too, the job is more than just a job.

He has been photographing locomotives since he was twelve. When he’s not driving a locomotive, Präkelt reads books and specialist magazines about the railway. When rail fans talk about rail as a means of transport, it becomes political – then it’s about the power of the auto industry, cheap flight tickets and the Fridays For Future movement: “The current climate debate has finally given the railways the meaning which she should actually have. “