A tragedy inspired Scotland's only woman freight train driver to get men talking about mental health.
As Scotland's only woman freight train driver, Heather Waugh was already a pioneer. Then a tragedy from her past inspired her to take on a new mission - getting men to talk about their mental health.
Heather, 44, drove passenger trains for 15 years before switching to Freightliner, her present employer, in 2019. And after so much practice in the rain and darkness, she could anticipate every gradient and curve of the line ahead. She knew how fast to approach each corner; when to apply the brakes and how long it would take before the wagons at the back would actually start to slow down.
There'd been a time when she hadn't dwelt much on this. Back then, Heather thought equality was about being treated the same as male colleagues. But recently she'd learned it was about much more than that. "My dad had no sense of humour," Heather says, affectionately. "He would come home each day, very staid: 'Oh my God, this happened today.'" But Kathleen would draw out the funny side of all the stories he'd tell them about his work, and she and Heather would laugh uproariously. "My mum's Glaswegian, so she has a great sense of humour."The family lived in a flat in Niddrie, a housing scheme on the south side of the Scottish capital.
After school she joined the Royal Mail and, by the age of 20, had risen to become the manager of 100 male postal workers. "The level of concentration is huge," she says. "You can have 150 stations in a single shift - and if you think, 'What did I bring for my tea tonight?' you can miss the braking point for your next station."
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