NSW Trains just celebrated 50 years of Vesela Grujoska’s service at Sydney's Central Station. She reveals the secret to remaining young and healthy despite enduring the challenges life threw at her.
Confidence, necessity or dignity of labour – call it what you will but Vesela Grujoska doesn’t stop working, just like the trains she helps run on Sydney’s busy rail circuit. “I will, perhaps, when I reach 100… but maybe not even then,” says a determined 'Vesa,' as she's popularly known, when people ask her when she plans to retire.
While her livelihood was sorted, life became tumultuous on the personal front. She says she had “a very difficult marriage and divorce,” which left her a single mother with two young children, no money and no roof over their heads. Ms Grujoska was trapped under “a mountain of responsibility”. She needed to provide for her children, who were her top priority. The railway job paid her $50 fortnightly.