macdo, you make a valid point, but one spends a long time in the RHS at the more desirable companies (like yours), years even, earning less than a train driver, 15 yrs possibly and in that time, house prices go up faster than affordability, if you take interest owing plus capital repayable on the average student loan plus FATPL and type rating into account.
You would have to engage an actuary to give accurate projections of capital accrual against investment expenditure to enable a purely financial decision to be made as to the best choice of career, and it sounds from this thread that the train drivers seem have the upper hand at todays prices.
In general, one thing that does stand out is the high quality of the postings from the train drivers, in stark comparison to the often rabid and grammatically challenged rantings that blight every thread on this website, purporting to be from qualified pilots.
Perhaps the fact that the mature, civilised and intelligent contributions to this debate mainly come from the train drivers and not from pilots (or people who say they are pilots) explains why the train drivers are taken more seriously by their employers.