Perhaps not unreasonably, there is an expectation from members of the public that, if you wear the uniform, you must know everything. Unfortunately, I was totally ill-equipped to fulfil the role of "Know-er of All Things".
Regrettably there was another fatality on our patch this evening just as the peak was subsiding. Whenever such things happen it takes time to get things up and running again, particualarly if there are no diversionary routes, as was the case tonight. Predictably, this didn't cause us any problems until our last run when we were due to take a slow train from Stratford down to Stansted Airport, being relieved by another driver at Bishops Stortford. This should have been a nice little run without any incident but, starting from Stratford, we had obviously been overlooked. By the time we had got to Tottenham Hale our train was being announced as going only as far as Bishops Stortford. First we'd heard of it...!! I had to shout down the platform at the station staff to get this confirmed.
So, that was where we were going and it would be up to our relief to worry about what happened after that. We made the necessary announcements and off we went. Eventually we arrive at what we still believe is our destination and open the doors only for a group of passengers with suitcases to get on. Funny, thinks I. It didn't take long for the questions to start. "'Scuse me, mate. This is going to the Airport, isn't it?", Is it? "It's just that we were told it was". Oh, well if you say so.
Such problems are evidently not restricted to the frontline staff either. Even though the office are aware of my progress, they hadn't twigged that I would complete my required hours by the end of this week. When I mentioned this to them they went into a flap. The result is that I start my final assessment next week, although it might not be until the week after that I complete it due to other demands on the Assessor's time.
Thursday, 26 January 2006
Sunday, 15 January 2006
The graveyard shift
It's 1:15am and I'm just in from one of our later jobs.
To be honest I don't much look forward to these Saturday late night turns, as there always seems to be something happening. On Friday night our train was hit by a missile of some sort resulting in a broken window, so I was expecting tonight to have been as eventful. At weekends, there tends to be large numbers of kids hanging about stations and riding on trains. In the most part they are just a bit loud and boisterous, but from time to time you get a group that just wants to cause trouble. Thankfully, most of the kids out and about tonight fell into the former group and, in spite of a whole evening up and down one of our more troublesome lines, we got nothing worse than a door being briefly pulled.
Following on from my previous entry, I've done a bit of digging around and managed to track down my missing hours. It would seem that six days worth of hours have not been recorded, which leaves my record about 25 hours short. Added to my current total, I reckon that it will only be another week or two until I will have completed my hours. One of the others in the same group as myself has already completed his and sits his final assessment next week.
I'm still not sure what all the MCB's in the PMOS cupboard are, though...
To be honest I don't much look forward to these Saturday late night turns, as there always seems to be something happening. On Friday night our train was hit by a missile of some sort resulting in a broken window, so I was expecting tonight to have been as eventful. At weekends, there tends to be large numbers of kids hanging about stations and riding on trains. In the most part they are just a bit loud and boisterous, but from time to time you get a group that just wants to cause trouble. Thankfully, most of the kids out and about tonight fell into the former group and, in spite of a whole evening up and down one of our more troublesome lines, we got nothing worse than a door being briefly pulled.
Following on from my previous entry, I've done a bit of digging around and managed to track down my missing hours. It would seem that six days worth of hours have not been recorded, which leaves my record about 25 hours short. Added to my current total, I reckon that it will only be another week or two until I will have completed my hours. One of the others in the same group as myself has already completed his and sits his final assessment next week.
I'm still not sure what all the MCB's in the PMOS cupboard are, though...
Friday, 6 January 2006
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...
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...
Friday, 23 December 2005
Tis the season...
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you out there who honour me by reading all this nonsense. It's been an interesting and exciting year for me, and I'm hoping that 2006 will be just as good.
Friday, 16 December 2005
Class reunion
My minder said to me some weeks back that you never forget the people that you trained with and that the friendships that you have with them will always remain special. I believed him then, but I believe him all the more now.
On Wednesday of this week, I managed to bump into all but one of the trainees that I started with in Ipswich way back in April. While this may seem insignificant to some, it's not always the case that you see the same people day after day as you would do in an office. Instead, you may see some people fairly regularly but others will remain strangers for weeks on end. So, to see so many of the folk I started with on the same day is a rarity. It was great to catch up with them all and to find out how they have been getting on. Some had good news and other not so good news. Either way, we're all progressing along the same path towards being fully qualified drivers, even if some of us are feeling more bumps than others.
I'm sure that, whatever befalls us in the future, this job will have brought me a clutch of new friends and people that I will never forget. It may be that our paths will diverge at some point, but I hope that the friendships I have now will stand the test of time.
On Wednesday of this week, I managed to bump into all but one of the trainees that I started with in Ipswich way back in April. While this may seem insignificant to some, it's not always the case that you see the same people day after day as you would do in an office. Instead, you may see some people fairly regularly but others will remain strangers for weeks on end. So, to see so many of the folk I started with on the same day is a rarity. It was great to catch up with them all and to find out how they have been getting on. Some had good news and other not so good news. Either way, we're all progressing along the same path towards being fully qualified drivers, even if some of us are feeling more bumps than others.
I'm sure that, whatever befalls us in the future, this job will have brought me a clutch of new friends and people that I will never forget. It may be that our paths will diverge at some point, but I hope that the friendships I have now will stand the test of time.
Monday, 12 December 2005
Uncharted territory
For a suburban rail company it's not often that you get an entire job where you never get to your main London terminus, and yet that's exactly what happened today.
The company has been very brave and almost completely re-cast the winter timetable, which now includes services to Stratford as well as Liverpool Street. This afternoon's job was actually a lovely little six hour turn with plenty of time at the end of each run. For me, it was an opportunity to drive over a route that I had never even seen before. Although it was a little daunting the first time through, it's not actually too difficult.
On the down side, the new timetable is going to take a little bit of getting used to. Not only are most of the passengers a little bemused as to the destination and routing of the trains, but the new (and not totally logical stopping patterns) are likely to catch out unwary drivers resulting in "failed to calls" or station overruns. More than once today I've had people coming up to the cab window either wanting to know where the train stopped or why it's not stopping at a particular station. The biggest shift seems to be for passengers on the Hertford East branch. Previously, the majority of trains called at all stations via Southbury and Seven Sisters. Now there are none in the week that follow that route, and now there are some that don't even go to Liverpool Street. After tonight's experience, I shall be countering this by making lots of loud and clear PA announcements so that no-one can say that they weren't told.
Chatting to my minder tonight, it seems that time is rapidly catching up with me. By our reckoning, it will probably only take another five or six weeks for me to complete the requisite number of hours before taking the final assessment. I have mixed emotions about this. I'm a little surprised as the time seems to have gone by remarkably quickly, while also being impatient to get it all over and done with. However, the primary emotion is fear about how much I have probably forgotten and will need to revise.
So, it's back to the books for me.
The company has been very brave and almost completely re-cast the winter timetable, which now includes services to Stratford as well as Liverpool Street. This afternoon's job was actually a lovely little six hour turn with plenty of time at the end of each run. For me, it was an opportunity to drive over a route that I had never even seen before. Although it was a little daunting the first time through, it's not actually too difficult.
On the down side, the new timetable is going to take a little bit of getting used to. Not only are most of the passengers a little bemused as to the destination and routing of the trains, but the new (and not totally logical stopping patterns) are likely to catch out unwary drivers resulting in "failed to calls" or station overruns. More than once today I've had people coming up to the cab window either wanting to know where the train stopped or why it's not stopping at a particular station. The biggest shift seems to be for passengers on the Hertford East branch. Previously, the majority of trains called at all stations via Southbury and Seven Sisters. Now there are none in the week that follow that route, and now there are some that don't even go to Liverpool Street. After tonight's experience, I shall be countering this by making lots of loud and clear PA announcements so that no-one can say that they weren't told.
Chatting to my minder tonight, it seems that time is rapidly catching up with me. By our reckoning, it will probably only take another five or six weeks for me to complete the requisite number of hours before taking the final assessment. I have mixed emotions about this. I'm a little surprised as the time seems to have gone by remarkably quickly, while also being impatient to get it all over and done with. However, the primary emotion is fear about how much I have probably forgotten and will need to revise.
So, it's back to the books for me.
Monday, 5 December 2005
Facts of life
There is never an easy way to broach the subject of fatalities on the railways. They are an ever-present risk to drivers and train-crew, and have unfortunately come crashing into my little world in quite a big way just lately.
Obviously there was the recent and widely reported tragedy at Elsenham, but there has been yet another this evening. This time the fatality happened at Hackney Downs and was the result of a suicide. Thankfully I was up the Hertford branch at the time it happened, but the recovery was still in progress when I called at Hackney Downs on the way back well over an hour later. By that time, the services on our lines had been comprehensively disrupted which caused many services to be delayed or cancelled. It's quite surprising how much havoc the selfish actions of a single person can cause.
Having said that, my overriding emotional response to such events is deep sadness. Whether through accident or deliberate action, I can't help but feel that a life has been wasted and that there will inevitably be others, such as friends or family members, whose lives will be utterly affected as a result.
Obviously there was the recent and widely reported tragedy at Elsenham, but there has been yet another this evening. This time the fatality happened at Hackney Downs and was the result of a suicide. Thankfully I was up the Hertford branch at the time it happened, but the recovery was still in progress when I called at Hackney Downs on the way back well over an hour later. By that time, the services on our lines had been comprehensively disrupted which caused many services to be delayed or cancelled. It's quite surprising how much havoc the selfish actions of a single person can cause.
Having said that, my overriding emotional response to such events is deep sadness. Whether through accident or deliberate action, I can't help but feel that a life has been wasted and that there will inevitably be others, such as friends or family members, whose lives will be utterly affected as a result.
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