Train driver plans life where tracks are musical You can be stuck at a red light for three hours . . . It's a good time to write songs,' train driver trainer and singer-songwriter Tenielle Neda says. SOME budding musos work in bars or cafes to help pay the rent; others scrape by on gig money. Living the dream comes later. For West Australian singer Tenielle Neda the prospect of a music career is just around the bend, but for most of her adulthood the 26-year-old from Carnarvon has had to juggle recording and performing with her day job -- driving locomotives. Neda works for mining company Rio Tinto at its plant in Karratha in Western Australia's Pilbara where since she was a teenager she has driven locomotives, some of them 2.5km long and carrying cargo weighing more than 30,000 tonnes, to and from the nearby port at Dampier. Now Neda has moved on to training other employees how to drive, while plotting the next step in her music career, recording her debut album. "It feels like I live two lives," she said. It's such a different world in Karratha. Then when I go to Sydney or Melbourne I meet up with other musicians who are so in the scene. It's nice being separate from all of that too, though. I can just focus on my songs. The singer, who is signed to Island Records, released her second EP, Daylight Disguise, a few months ago and has a string of interstate gigs coming up in the next week. Neda moved to Karratha when she was 17 to be with her older brother and took a variety of jobs before becoming a locomotive driver. Since then she has enjoyed some success as a country singer, winning the Telstra Road to Tamworth competition in 2009-10. She quit work for a couple of years after that, during which her songs took on a more folkie, Joni Mitchell sheen. Last year she returned to work, but still with her eye on the prize of a long-term music career. She enjoyed the work, she said, and during her driving shifts even found time to write a few songs. "When you're out there on your own you can be stuck at a red light for three hours," she said. It can get pretty boring, but I like it. It's a good time to write songs. Now Neda works behind the scenes, co-ordinating the training of other drivers, but she's hoping that an album next year will open the door to being a professional muso. And she has a back-up plan. If she doesn't make it as a solo artist she would like to be a successful songwriter. "I definitely don't want to be driving trains forever," she said.