Drivers wages on the London Underground and on the national rail network have increased dramatically over the past two or three decades, even as some of the demands of the job have reduced. A modern electric or diesel train is simpler to drive and much less physically demanding than a steam locomotive.
However, other aspects of the job are as demanding as ever, and probably much tougher than similar aspects of flying a passenger aircraft. The aircrew will have a written plan for a flight, identifying the waypoints that are relevant for the conditions on the day, and will have detailed charts of the arrival area. The train driver today may have a written working timetable, showing when to be at various points along his (or her) route, but may not, and in steam days would probably not have been able to keep it legible long enough to be of any use, even if there was light enough to read it. Driving a train from A to B is not just a case of starting off, setting power levels and starting to slown down sufficiently far before reaching the destination so as to be able to stop in the appointed place without atracting opprobium for being late. Landing short is not so much of a problem, but there is no chance of a go around if you come in too fast. And scheduled stops are not the only places where speed management is needed. There are speed limits to be observed, some permanent, some temporary (announced in the railway equivalent of the NOTAM). There are signals to be observed, some a few miles apart, some with only a few hundred yards or less between them. The driver has to know each signal on his route, which side it is on, where it is in relation to others and to other features such as changes in gradient, and in many places has to be able to pick out "his" signal from an array of a dozen or so on an overhead gantry. Several hundred memory items for, say, a trip between London and Manchester, possibly several thousand overall for someone working from a busy shed. One of the major rail accidents of recent years was caused by an inexperienced driver mistaking one signal for another.
The aircraft driver has, of course, some skills that have no equivalent on the railways, but the requirements of the job are not so dissimilar as some imagine.