There were a couple of pilots that I know of who were placed into either the redundancy or retention pool at a Big Airline who became train drivers at my employer, I believe both have returned straight back to said airline in the past few weeks.
If an airline in the next couple of years did a scheme similar to that run by Bristow Helicopters earlier this year where the cadets had their training fully funded I'd seriously consider applying.
The difference is that drivers of the tube operate in a very small and transparent market, there are drivers and the city which employs them. No other players. No competition, and crucially, no substitute.There is no low cost/ short haul/ long haul/ cargo/ corporate/ international tube. There is just one employer. and there is also only one price for passengers, no competion whatsoever.
The tube by many accounts does seem to have a continuous battle between management and the unions, the impression I get is of a very adversarial relationship whereas on the mainline companies that isn't necessarily the case. Quite a few drivers move from tube to mainline and very few in the opposite direction.
Quite a lot of mainline driver pay in Britain has been driven by poaching. Post-privatisation, one or two companies decided they wanted the best train drivers at almost any price and those companies helped to drive the market upwards. The DfT have unfortunately seemed to have cottoned on and these particular companies have been told to recruit lots of trainees externally to reduce the competition, historically the only trainees they took on were internal promotions. ASLEF still can't see the wood from the trees and haven't tried to maximise competition, instead pretending that everything would be better under nationalisation.
If we have two things easier than pilots when it comes to negotiating pay and conditions, they are as follows:
Firstly, all trainees must be employed by a train company from the first day of training, therefore the number of drivers in the market is limited, this is exacerbated by the fact that most companies rely on overtime to meet their timetabling needs.
Secondly, there isn't any international labour arbitrage, so if there is a dispute the employer can't bring in a railway equivalent of some ACMI operator from a low-wage country to cover the work. If the EU allowed industrial action over multiple jurisdictions in the same way that it allows companies to operate over multiple jurisdictions then I think pilots would be in a much stronger position. With many operators, if one national subsidiary takes action, they can get another subsidiary from the country next door to cover quite a bit of the work.