"Kick me"

While I was off work following my incident, I received a text message from my minder in which he called me "probably the unluckiest bastard on the railway". I'm beginning to think that he's right as, thinking back, I think I've had at least one thing happen every shift since passing out. Prior to that my luck had been pretty good, so I don't know what I've done to deserve this. It's almost as if I'm walking around with the cosmic equivalent of a piece of paper with "kick me" written on taped to my back. I guess I should have been in for a bad time when I relieved the depot's resident Harbinger of Doom off the Unit of the Beast (317666) on Monday for my first drive on my own since my fatality, but things went so well. Perhaps the Fates were just lulling me into a false sense of security.

As mentioned in the previous entry, I had the same job twice in a row this week. It was actually quite a nice one with plenty of time allowed to carry out a thorough train prep before the unit was needed in the platform and I was needed
on the Stansted Express. However, it was a case of contrasts and similarities.

Train Prep

On Tuesday the unit to be prepped was full of litter but fault free, while Wednesday's unit had at least been cleaned of litter but was labouring under a number of minor faults.

First Train

The first set of Stansted Express units I drove didn't seem to want to go London, as they were down on power heading towards the capital but went like stink going back towards the airport. Even though I checked both units out at Liverpool Street, I couldn't find a single thing wrong with them. Strangely this happened both days, even though I checked that they weren't the same pair of units.

Second Train

The second pair of units driven after my break were fine, although I had to fail the train near Cheshunt on the way down to Stansted on Tuesday after losing interlock due to what later turned out to be a door fault in, you guessed it, the eighth carriage. I don't think the punters were best pleased with facing the prospect of missing their flights, but I must have made a good enough show of looking exasperated and trying to get things moving again as they mercifully chose not to lay into me about it, even when I went past them the second time. I got given a different set of units for my final run down towards Stansted which behaved themselves, as did the set I had on Wednesday. However, I was keeping a beady eye on the interlock light the whole way just to be sure.

At least I can say that I've clocked up another first. On Wednesday I arrived at work to find my very first "please explain" in my pigeon hole asking for more information about the nature of the failure. I had guessed that this was coming, so I had already written a driver's report form. In fact, I had written it while still on the unit that had caused me all the problems in the first place while waiting for the signaller to give me the road back to London.

Please let next week be incident free.