Comedy of errors

I'm very pleased to say that my minder driving is going very well indeed and that I'm enjoying it very much. The initial nervousness has now all but gone, and even two return trips out to Enfield Town in a Class 315 hasn't dampened my spirits.

Being on late turns this week, I've had my first experience of driving in the dark. From road driving experience I knew that it would be totally different to driving in the light, but it's even more dodgy on the rails. A particular problem is differentiating between what is and what is not a signal. Indeed, quite a large number of lights in the vicinity of the lineside appear to have been erected and sited without any thought to how they might appear to drivers. Thankfully real signals tend to stand out pretty well against the background by virtue of being dazzlingly bright, although this in itself caused me a few headaches as they blot out everything else in their immediate vicinity (including stop boards and DOO monitors). Obviously, with some practice and experience, I should get a better idea of the layout of places and have to rely less on actually seeing something in order to judge how to stop at it. Still, it's still early days.

On a more amusing note, there appears to have been a few mix ups at Liverpool Street box this evening, which left my minder and I looking like chumps. Firstly, we were routed wrongly onto the 'Down Fast' line at Bethnal Green rather than the 'Down Suburban'. When we stopped and queried it and advised the signaller that we would not be able to make our booked stop at London Fields from the 'Down Fast', we were told that the correct route had been set due to a problem at London Fields and that we would have to miss out that station. We couldn't see any problem when we went past, but we'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that one.

The second blooper that affected us was at Seven Sisters. We'd just run empty down from Cheshunt and had run onto the chord at Seven Sisters Junction to reverse back into the station before running down to Broxbourne. We'd just changed ends and set up the cab when the signal came off early. Thinking that the signaller knew what he/she was doing, we took it and pulled into Seven Sisters platform some 12 minutes early. Big mistake, as we'd been pulled out ahead of an Enfield Town service we should have been following. Many PA announcements and impromptu visits to the cab window later, and we left on time with a train groaning with punters. The last I saw of the Enfield Town service was that it was being advertised as being about 15 minutes late at Edmonton Green.

Although we were the butt of other people's mistakes today, I wouldn't want people to get the impression that I think I know it all. I made my own share of mistakes. I forgot to announce London Fields as a station stop on our first trip down to Enfield Town and had to deal with people coming to the cab window to ask whether we were stopping there. I also moved the master switch to "off" by mistake rather than selecting "neutral" when waiting at a red signal and had to set up the cab radio again. I've also got a less than perfect record at stopping on the mark or pulling up to other units at Liverpool Street.

But then, I am still learning...