Back to the books

Happy New Year to everyone!!

The festive season turned out to be a fairly quiet time. Although I worked up to a pretty eventful Christmas Eve, I managed to wangle plenty of leave so that I didn't have to go back to work until Tuesday of this week. However, I still managed to fill most of that time off with visiting family, over-eating and exchanging gifts. It was almost a relief to go back to work and drive trains just so that I had something constructive to do.

Now that I am back in the saddle, I have decided that I really ought to start revising all the things that I learned on the Rules and Traction courses that I attended a lifetime ago. I feel pretty confident that most of the more regular things are still floating around quite close to the front of my head, but I know that there's an awful lot that I'm now worryingly hazy about. For example, the question that I most dread my minder asking is "Name the MCB's in the PMOS electrical cupboard", as I really can't remember more than about half a dozen.

The trouble is that I'm not entirely sure how long I've got. Given the amount of time that I've now been out driving with a minder I had thought that my final assessment might be sometime in the next month or two, but I've yet to hear anything definite. I can't even make an educated guess, as the number of hours they have recorded for me appears to be somewhat short of the total I had been expecting. Having looked more deeply into the situation, it appears that there is a four week gap in my record. While I can confirm that I was not driving over two of these weeks, it seems that someone somewhere might have mislaid some record sheets or failed to add the hours to my total. Either way, it could make quite a bit of difference.

Looks like a mystery fit for Hercule Poirot...