Job descriptions
03. 07. 2023
Gergely Koppányi has been part of the Hungarian locomotive drivers' team of the Rail Cargo Group (RCG) since 2019. In his job, he brings goods weighing tonnes from A to B every week – a job with a lot of responsibility. And every day brings new scenery and impressions. That's exactly what's so exciting about it, he tells us in the interview.
I am always proud when I can bring the company's train to its destination. A special sense of achievement is when I reach the destination smoothly despite aggravating factors and circumstances, such as the current track closures.
One challenge can be that freight transport is less predictable than passenger transport and therefore requires more flexibility from us drivers. Duty rosters change sometimes – it can happen that the place where I start or end my shift suddenly changes, so that you have to reschedule your journey home together with the company, for example. But you can prepare well for all that. The job requires a certain degree of flexibility and willingness to compromise. And at the same time, that's the beauty of it: no two shifts are the same.
In my opinion, the opposite happened to me: The profession found me at a young age. At my grandparents' house, you could see the passing trains of the Sopron¬–Győr line from the end of the garden. As a three-year-old boy, I clung to the garden fence and admired the trains as they rushed by. I am convinced: my profession was already decided then and after a few detours I finally arrived at my current job at the age of 26.
It's an old story, but it still makes me smile: In Hegyeshalom, I wanted to have a coffee in the coordinator's office early in the morning at the start of my shift. My colleagues explained to me where the coffee machine was, but I simply could not handle the machine. There was no coffee coming out, just a buzzing sound. Then my colleagues asked me: How could I be trusted with a locomotive when I can't even handle a coffee machine?
