Back to school

After the front end turns comes the Rules Course.

With the change of activity comes a change of location. For the next couple of months, our place of work will not be a Portakabin in the Hornsey depot car park, but a cosy little room under the eaves at the Cambridge driver depot. It's not a bad little set-up, and much more convenient to get to in the morning. Travelling up by train each day we're going the opposite direction to all the other commuters heading into the 'big smoke', which means that we have the rare pleasure of getting seats. On the downside, the building we are in is so close to the country end of Cambridge station that we have to temporarily halt proceedings every time a diesel service pulls in or out of platforms 4, 5 and 6. Standing outside we are barely in a position of safety as Ipswich bound Sprinters pull in and out of the platform.

I had been warned previously that the course content was very similar to the introductory course that we had done. In fact, one Silverlink driver who had just completed his rules course in the next classroom to us at Hornsey reckoned that it was 95% the same but a little more in-depth, with just 5% new content. And so day one proved; even down to the identical handouts. Still, I guess it's good revision.