"...and relax."

I'm a very happy chappy today, as I have passed my rules exam. Having actually sat the exam yesterday I spent most of last night as a ball of nerves until I heard the outcome this morning by text message from our trainer.

One of the things that I was most worried about was that there appeared to be a couple of spurious questions in the last weekly assessment where the expected answer was different from that given in the handouts and, in one notable case, the Rule Book. It was all a bit hard to explain, especially given that the bloke who wrote the course material also wrote the assessments and is supposed to be hot on rules. It certainly made me worry whether there would be any similarly 'odd' questions in the final exam.

The question that caused all the problems was: "If your train is involved in a train accident what are your 4 main priorities?" The handout listed them in the following order:

1. The passage of trains is stopped on each obstructed line.
2. The signaller is informed and the emergency services are summoned if required.
3. Carry out protection where required.
4. Ensure the passengers are safe.
   

As we had all studiously learnt this, this is what we all wrote on our assessments. When we got them back we were amazed to see that contacting the signaller had been relegated to below carrying out protection. When I checked the Rule Book it backed up our conviction that we had answered this question correctly, as Module M1 says that emergency protection is only required if the signaller cannot provide protection by any other means or you are unable to contact the signaller. If you waited to contact the signaller until you had carried out protection it's likely that he'd be doing his pieces trying to work out why you'd stopped and be trying to contact you himself.

Still, while we all understood what we would actually do should this scenario ever arise, we were smart enough to know to give the answer that was expected of us so that we got through the assessment.

Although the thought of being passed competent is a little scary, having completed this part of my training I shall be kicking back and relaxing tonight. If I may be forgiven a little immodesty, having been asked a total of 452 assessment questions throughout the duration of this course, I'm hugely chuffed to have only had eight marked for review.