Go off the rails

Idioms | C1

Thanks for sharing your experience Erich – it’s a really good example.

– Careful with the phrasal verb ‘to drop out of sth’. When you include the thing that you are leaving or quitting (e.g. school, the army), you need ‘of’. So your example should be: “I dropped out of the army”.

– Very good use of the past perfect: “I felt that my life had gone off the rails”.

Out of interest, how do you feel now about dropping out of the army?

Wow, that’s a very good example Gulnar.

One little correction about the tense you chose (he had gone off the rails). By using the past perfect (he had gone off the rails), you’re saying that this happened before the other action in your sentence (the man was intelligent etc). So in your example, first he went off the rails, and then he was intelligent, wealthy etc)..

I think the sequence is probably the opposite – first he was intelligent and wealthy, and then he went off the rails and lost everything. When we are telling a story and are just describing a normal sequence of events, past simple is best (e.g. You knew a man who was intelligent and wealthy, but then he went off the rails).

We use the past perfect to make it clear that we are talking about something that happened before something else (e.g. “his wife was very sad because her husband had gone off the rails” – first he went off the rails, then his wife was sad).

I hope that makes sense – this is quite a difficult area of grammar. Let me know if you’d like a couple more examples.