A FORMER Bury firefighter has left the service to embark on a new career as a train driver.

Saul Hickey, aged 40, worked as a crew manager at Bury Fire Station before making the transition earlier this month.

And he is only the latest in a string of firefighters to have made the switch in recent years. He claims to be following in the footsteps of more than 20 others from across the region who have swapped fighting fires for driving trains.

“It has become a running joke throughout the service now,” he said.

“There are a lot of crossover skills, including the ability to work shifts, being able to concentrate, being able to take on technical information, and dealing with members of the public.

“It seems an exciting sector to be in right now.”

What attracted Mr Hickey to the career was the promise of improved working conditions, an attractive pension scheme, as well as investment in train infrastructure.

He contrasts this with the fire service, which has been subject to continuous cuts in recent years,

Mr Hickey said: “In the public sector, it is austerity and further cuts year on year to the budgets. How far do you cut before you say enough is enough?

“I have seen Bury fire station go from two fire engines, a special appliance and a watch of 12, to one pump and a watch of six.”

Mr Hickey says he became disillusioned with the job as a result of unsatisfactory pay and an ever-increasing workload.

He explained: “Firefighters are the poorer emergency service. We would speak to people when we were out and they would be shocked at what we took home paywise.

“It’s a dangerous, demanding job and it does not come with the right salary rewards. Since I joined in 2007, our workload has steadily increased, but without any pay reward.”

After beginning his career in Bolton, Mr Hickey moved to Bury in 2009, where he was based until his recent departure. However, he says he feared a “bleak future” if he did not leave the service.

He explained: “I put myself through a fairly arduous promotion process and found myself in charge of a station when the watch manager was elsewhere.

“I could be first in attendance to any manner of incident and I was on just over £33,000 a year for that. A police officer is on not much less than £40,000, and paramedics are not far off that. Over the years, we have just fallen further behind.”

He added that firefighters’ morale also took a hit following the publication of the Kerslake Report - an independent review into the emergency response to the Manchester Arena attack.

The report criticised the fire service’s response and found that poor communications meant chief fire officers stopped crews attending the scene.

Mr Hickey said: “We were upset because we wanted to help and we were tarnished as an organisation.”

Only recently, plans were revealed to close a number fire stations in a bid to save £12.8m over the next three years.

And Mr Hickey says he is concerned about the impact cuts are having on the service.

“I worry about morale and how the cuts will affect response times,” he said. “I worry about station closures.”

“We have seen year after year of cuts, but year after year of doing more with no increase in salary to go along with that.”

Gary Keary, the FBU’s regional representative, said: “Unfortunately we have seen a trend over the past year or so where we have lost firefighters to the rail industry.

“Maybe this isn’t so surprising given the constant attack our service has been under for the past 10 years, sadly there still appears to be no end to the cuts.

“When you add to this that many firefighters have seen their pensions attacked by this government on top of a worsening in pay it’s not hard to understand why firefighters’ are leaving the service, something that a few years ago was unheard of.”

GMFRS has been approached for comment.