Stating the bleedin' obvious

It would seem that I was perhaps a little hasty in my previous assessment of the rules course content. There are indeed quite a few differences between this and the content of the introductory course that we had previously sat at Hornsey, it's just that you need to look closely to find them.

It was at about the halfway point of last week that it suddenly hit home to me that I didn't actually know exactly what our instructor was talking about at all times. This actually came as something of a shock and caused me to sit up and pay a bit more attention. Instead of just nodding and making a mental note to look up my notes from Hornsey, I decided that I would make a conscious effort to listen and absorb, and would ask any questions as they occurred to me rather than bottling them up for another time. I'm only going to get this opportunity to learn an awful lot of really important information about my roles and responsibilities, so I really must make sure that I understand it fully before I get out there myself.

One other aspect of the rules course that has caught us all out is just how pedantic it can be. It's not good enough just to know in your head how you would carry out a certain task if you can't describe it. At our first weekly assessment, we all failed to complete a question asking how we would quickly protect a section of line we had just passed over that had a track defect in it. We all knew that it was by using a track circuit operating clip, but what we had singularly failed to mention was the very first thing we would do to make this possible. That is, to stop the train. I thought that this went without saying (I suppose the instructor imagined that I would just toss the clip out the window and hope that by some enormous fluke it would snap onto the rails just so), but we were all mistaken and got this question marked for review.

Duh...!!