Out with a whimper

Once again, sorry for the lack of updates. My PC decided to die an unpleasant death and I had to wait for a replacement which only arrived a couple of days ago.

Well, the two weeks with an empty unit is now up and we all seem to have done very well. As well as getting some practice in of controlling a train, we practiced station stops and station duties at various points and with varying degrees of success. Perhaps somewhat uncharitably, other drivers had seized on our train as an excuse to explain any delays they had accrued and "late running of crew training train" featured heavily on the delay reporting sheet. I guess some of this was justified, as the various signallers either wouldn't allow us to depart on time or would take decisions in our favour (which included holding a southbound freight service so that he could show us the bi-directional movements at Audley End).

It would have been nice to have had the chance of a bit more practice, but we were only diagrammed for two return trips before the train was needed again for the evening peak. Once these had been split between the seven of us, it meant that on most days each trainee only got between 15 and 20 minutes at the controls. In between turns, we passed the time by playing cards, reading, sleeping and chatting. Although this meant that the atmosphere was nicely chilled, it also made the days seem very long. Still, I successfully managed not to put on too much weight from eating cakes (although, to be fair, they weren't required to be bought very often).

Next week should be a traction conversion course to cover Class 315 EMU's but, because of a miscommunication between the various parties involved, this isn't happening until later this month. In fact, it took several of us phoning various people to get even that organised, as each thought it was the responsibility of the other. Sadly this is not untypical and won't be sorted until all driver training is finally taken in-house. So, instead of traction conversion we have an extra week of front end turns.

Oh goody.