The train raced at 140 km / h, just about as the two youngsters made it across the tracks: For engine driver Dominik Hecker, it was a shocking moment that he cannot forget, the 25-year-old tells us today.
From a statistical point of view, train drivers have experienced "personal injury accidents" three times in their careers.
Hecker is aware of this.
But he's not afraid, he says.
"Then you could no longer concentrate on your work."
Even as a child, train driver was his dream job, says Hecker.
Nevertheless, after graduating from high school, he decided to study.
First law, then economics.
"But I still had in the back of my mind that I might still want to go to the railroad at some point."
He made his lateral entry through an eleven-month qualification course at Keolis, a subsidiary of the French state railway SNCF, which operates the Eurobahn in the Ruhr area.
For the first exam, he and his classmates had to: go to the railway museum;
They learned how to brake on historic mail wagons.
Hecker has been in possession of a train driver's license since August 2020 and drives passengers on the RE 3 and RE 13 lines. The latter runs from Hamm in Westphalia to the Dutch border town of Venlo.
For the last few kilometers, however, Hecker has to hand over the wheel: he himself is not allowed to cross the national border.
"All colleagues who go to the Netherlands need special training and must be able to speak Dutch," he says.
That is also understandable.
In an emergency you have to be able to communicate in the official language of the country.
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Regardless of the route: Hecker prefers to work at night.
“I'm not an early riser.
I like to sleep in in the morning, which is why I prefer to work late or night shifts. «He doesn't know any free weekends - in shift work, his days off are postponed every week.
But he doesn't think that's bad: "I always get the deployment plans in the middle of the month for the following month, so I can plan accordingly."
In the podcast, Dominik Hecker explains why a train driver is his dream job and why he still enrolled at a remote university for a master’s degree.
And why he believes that the job will be around for a long time, even if the first S-Bahn trains are already driving autonomously.
