‘I married the train driver who saved my life’

On a summer afternoon in 2019, nurse Charlotte Lay got ready for her night shift as normal but “wasn’t feeling quite right”.

Within a short space of time she had decided to end her own life close to a West Yorkshire railway station.

But thanks to the kindness of the train driver who found her in crisis, she did not go through with it.

Three years later they married each other and went on to have children.

“I’d struggled with my mental health since my teens and I’d been in and out of the system since,” Charlotte, now 33, says.

Her memories of that day five years ago are “quite blurry” but she says she remembers seeing a train pulling up on the tracks where she was, close to Crossflatts Station, near Bradford.

“I remember seeing a man getting off the train and starting to panic and thinking he was going to tell me off,” she recalls.

“He approached me and said ‘Hi, my name is Dave, are you having a bad day?’

“I said ‘yeah, just a bit’. He went ‘OK’, we can sit and talk until it feels better.”

Dave, who works for train operator Northern, remembers getting out of his cab, “kneeling down” in front of Charlotte and introducing himself.

He told her they would talk things through “until you feel comfortable enough” to get onto the train, where she could be taken to safety.

The pair talked for half an hour, by which time Charlotte, though still distressed, agreed to get into the cab. She was taken to Skipton Station and left in the care of the police.

The following day, Charlotte was desperate to find the man who had been so kind to her and issued an appeal on a local Facebook group for anyone who worked for Northern who might be able to put her in touch.

“I’d have understood if he didn’t want to hear from me, but I just wanted to say ‘thank you’ for giving me the time and for treating me like I was human being,” she says.

Her plea was successful and after Charlotte was given Dave’s number by one of his colleagues who had seen the appeal, she sent him a text.

Dave, who is now 47, was equally relieved to hear from her.

He says he had “never had the opportunity” to get off the train and talk to someone in crisis before.

“I needed to know she was all right,” he explains. “I’d contacted police to try to find out what happened to her and just wanted to make sure she was safe.

“I felt like I’d had a duty to make sure she was all right. We’d had that rapport built by the side of the track. It was just nice to be able to make that difference to somebody.”

After Dave returned Charlotte’s text telling her he was available whenever she needed to speak to someone, they began exchanging messages on a daily basis.

They then met for a coffee two months later and the rest was history.

In 2022, the couple, who live in nearby Wilsden, got married, with Charlotte 22 weeks pregnant.

But before then, there was one more twist to their story.

In July 2020, Dave was diagnosed with testicular cancer, after he went to his GP with a bad back.

He is adamant that he would never have gone to the doctors were it not for Charlotte’s insistence.

“It’s because I’m a bloke,” he says.

“I’d done 12 or 13 years in the motor trade working on cold floors and out in the elements, lifting and carrying silly things. I just put it down to a bad back.

“Charlotte kept saying ‘Go to the doctors’. I said it was just me getting old.”

Weeks after his diagnosis, Dave was given the all clear.

A consultant at St James’ Hospital in Leeds last year told him he would no longer have been alive had he not had been diagnosed when he was.

“Charlotte may say I saved her life, which I don’t know about really, but she saved my life as well,” Dave says.

The couple say they wanted to share their story in the hope that anyone who is struggling can know better times are around the corner.

“Life does get better,” Charlotte, who is now a mum of three, says. “You just have to be here to see it.”

Charlotte says that it is often too difficult for people who are struggling to “reach out” and ask for help, so suggests people around them “reach in” instead. She continues to receive ongoing support for her mental health.

She believes asking someone if they are OK more than once can help them open up.

“We owe it to each other to be checking in with people around us,” she says.

“You don’t have to offer life-changing advice or say anything profound. Just sitting down with a cuppa can make all the difference.

“Because of what I’ve been through, I had a duty to talk about it and I’m hoping it’s going to be a conversation starter.”