Polly McGillivray Interviewed by Ash Read

Interview with Polly McGillivray recorded by Ash Read on 20 April 2026. Duration: 1 hour 47 minutes 15 seconds. [Start of interview, track 01] Childhood in London, school, poverty, Section 28, council estate, and working at age 14 to help her family. She recalls family links to entertainment industry, and her early interest in special effects, learning special effects, working on film sets in Los Angeles. [00:12:05] Leaving special effects for sales and marketing for financial security; life in shared house and coming out; losing job due to recession; future jobs prospects, Royal Air Force, applying to become a train driver with LOROL (London Overground Rail Operations Ltd). Train driver role assessments, being offered train driver job, receiving her train key and rule books, and valuing the pay and benefits. [00:23:35] PM reflects on more women entering train driving, her choice of staying closeted at work, and sexist and queerphobic remarks faced by LGBTQIA+ women. She discusses poor women’s uniform design, being denied men’s clothing when women’s uniform was impractical and exposing, how she challenged this and helped change uniform policy. [00:33:45] She describes learning to drive trains, taking a stand in a misogynistic workplace, and choosing not to come out while training. She discusses the Huntingdon Incident (2025 Cambridgeshire train stabbing) as an example of decisions drivers may face. She recalls driving freight trains in Australia between Melbourne and New South Wales, shifts, pay, Outback scenery, 2-kilometre trains, rail buckling in heat, derailment, heatstroke. Leaving Australia following redundancy, unemployment in the UK, and later gaining a Learning Specialist role at Southern. [00:52:50] PM talks about working at GTR (Govia Thameslink Railway) and marrying her wife in 2018. She discusses Southern workers’ strikes, support for conductors/Onboard Supervisors for passenger safety, perimenopause, protests, campaigning against Reform UK to defend workers’ and human rights and developing RSSB (Rail Safety and Standards Board) training on human behaviour, motivation, safety and recruitment bias. [end of track 01] [Track 02] PM discusses living with her father after the USA, wanting to rent in London, realising she was part of the LGBTQIA+ community, questioning her sexuality in her youth and realising in her early twenties that she was gay. She recalls women-seeking-women adverts, phone messages, Gay Scene magazine, and finding LGBTQIA+ venues including the Candy Bar and Soho clubs. [00:07:00] She compares generations’ attitudes, discusses coming to understand nonbinary gender, continued activism, threats from figures such as Trump and Farage, and how workplace banter, jokes and complicity embolden bigotry. She reflects on being closeted in rail, difficulties faced by openly gay colleagues, the lack of many out LGBTQIA+ people in the industry, and gay women being fetishised or dismissed by straight men. [00:15:25] PM discusses finding little gay scene in Australia, racism and cultural differences, people-pleasing, redundancy and returning from Australia. She reflects on becoming interested in Britain’s railway history and architecture, views on renationalisation and funding, the need to focus on safety, trauma and the impact on drivers of hitting a person. [00:28:21] She describes dating after becoming a trainer as exhausting, then taking up strongman competitions, gaining confidence through weightlifting/heavy lifting, how she met her future wife through the Brenda app, moving from Brighton to Worthing, and experiencing a homophobic incident there. [end of track 02] [Track 03] PM reflects on volunteering to People Pride and Progress as an interviewer, how hard it was to find participants, connecting this to closeted colleagues and her own experiences of hiding her sexuality. She wants the NRM to do more on women in rail, LGBTQIA+ railway history and women’s history. [end of interview]

This interview was made as part of People Pride and Progress (PPP) project. The project was initiated in 2023 to record the stories and memories of the LGBTQIA+ community in a new oral history archive over two years. It aimed to connect past, present and future through intergenerational interviews, offering opportunities for colleagues across all parts of the rail industry to connect, reflect on and learn from each other’s lived experiences while creating an archive of oral history interviews.