I’m very pleased to say that my minder driving is going very well indeed and that I’m enjoying it very much. The initial nervousness has now all but gone, and even two return trips out to Enfield Town in a Class 315 hasn’t dampened my spirits.

Being on late turns this week, I’ve had my first experience of driving in the dark. From road driving experience I knew that it would be totally different to driving in the light, but it’s even more dodgy on the rails. A particular problem is differentiating between what is and what is not a signal. Indeed, quite a large number of lights in the vicinity of the lineside appear to have been erected and sited without any thought to how they might appear to drivers. Thankfully real signals tend to stand out pretty well against the background by virtue of being dazzlingly bright, although this in itself caused me a few headaches as they blot out everything else in their immediate vicinity (including stop boards and DOO monitors). Obviously, with some practice and experience, I should get a better idea of the layout of places and have to rely less on actually seeing something in order to judge how to stop at it. Still, it’s still early days.

On a more amusing note, there appears to have been a few mix ups at Liverpool Street box this evening, which left my minder and I looking like chumps. Firstly, we were routed wrongly onto the ‘Down Fast’ line at Bethnal Green rather than the ‘Down Suburban’. When we stopped and queried it and advised the signaller that we would not be able to make our booked stop at London Fields from the ‘Down Fast’, we were told that the correct route had been set due to a problem at London Fields and that we would have to miss out that station. We couldn’t see any problem when we went past, but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on that one.

The second blooper that affected us was at Seven Sisters. We’d just run empty down from Cheshunt and had run onto the chord at Seven Sisters Junction to reverse back into the station before running down to Broxbourne. We’d just changed ends and set up the cab when the signal came off early. Thinking that the signaller knew what he/she was doing, we took it and pulled into Seven Sisters platform some 12 minutes early. Big mistake, as we’d been pulled out ahead of an Enfield Town service we should have been following. Many PA announcements and impromptu visits to the cab window later, and we left on time with a train groaning with punters. The last I saw of the Enfield Town service was that it was being advertised as being about 15 minutes late at Edmonton Green.

Although we were the butt of other people’s mistakes today, I wouldn’t want people to get the impression that I think I know it all. I made my own share of mistakes. I forgot to announce London Fields as a station stop on our first trip down to Enfield Town and had to deal with people coming to the cab window to ask whether we were stopping there. I also moved the master switch to “off” by mistake rather than selecting “neutral” when waiting at a red signal and had to set up the cab radio again. I’ve also got a less than perfect record at stopping on the mark or pulling up to other units at Liverpool Street .

But then, I am still learning…

Today is a day to remember, as it was our first day driving with our minders. Never mind shuttling up and down a siding or getting a brief drive, this was a full turn of duty with stops, passengers and a timetable to keep.

It would have been nice if they’d broken us in gently, but instead I drew the short straw. An intense 9 hours and 42 minutes of stopping suburban services with tight turnaround times was not an ideal introduction. Still, at least it gave me plenty of opportunities to practice stopping at stations and carrying out station duties. Eighty-three to be precise.

I was glad that I got on well with the Class 315 yesterday, as almost the entire job was driving one. Once they’re up and running they are quite a nice train to drive, with good acceleration and braking. On the downside they do require a higher degree of organisation and dexterity than the Class 317. Just to get into the cab and prepare for departure requires no fewer than four keys, none of which operate more than one lock. Then there’s having to coordinate the local door control switches, egress cocks and door key switches to ensure that the cab vestibule doors don’t fly open at inopportune moments; not to mention having to hold the power controller down before moving the master switch so that the brake doesn’t go straight in. I know that I’ll get there eventually, but it can be a bit of a palaver and I felt like I was all over the place for a while.

All of this has left me feeling absolutely knackered. As it’s all new I was concentrating entirely on driving to the exclusion of everything else. This wasn’t helped in any way by the first part of the job being virtually non-stop with little turnaround time at each destination.

On the other hand, I’ve already had my first problem. The signaller was unable to clear a faulty signal, which meant that I had to call him up and be given authority to pass it at danger. Not bad for my first day.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off for a kip. Tomorrow it’s all airport runs, which should be a less frenetic.

What looked like being a rather dull week actually contained a few little nuggets of interest. OK, sure I was stuck up the front of a Stansted Express unit looking at the same old scenery for far longer that I would have liked, but it wasn’t all bad.

Monday’s job was a nice easy one which ended up at Hornsey depot. This is a move I’ve already seen once and, having been at the training school there for a number of weeks, I was already quite familiar with the depot layout. The same could not be said about Ilford, where we ended up on Tuesday. That is one complicated looking place, and the run along the ‘Down Electric’ line from Liverpool Street was rather daunting. Although I’ve travelled along this route many times as a passenger, I had never seen the line ahead and never quite appreciated quite how scary it is to drive. The signals along that stretch come up thick and fast and for every one signal on the ‘Main’ lines there were two on the ‘Electric’ lines. In fact, it was typical to find a signal at each end of every station platform. On top of that, one particular signal at Manor Park has an OLE (overhead line) neutral section on the run up. Stopping at that signal (as we almost had to) with the 8 car EMU formation we were driving would have had the pantograph of the rear unit in the neutral section meaning no traction power from that part of the train to assist in starting. I’m sure with time and practice I’ll get the hang of it, but in the half-dark on Tuesday night it had me worried.

A day spent on the Stansted Express was an anticlimax after all that, but yesterday’s job ended up with a little gem. Because of an engineers possession between Harlow Town and Audley End our last train terminated at Harlow Town and, to facilitate it’s return to London, was crossed over onto the ‘Up Cambridge’ at the ground frame and ran wrong road into the station.

Now all this is completed, I’m quite looking forward to getting on with the job. From next Monday we shall all be back at Hornsey for a week and have had our Class 315 conversion confirmed for the following week. What happens after that I just don’t know. I’m hoping that we will start with our minders about then but something tells me that it’s unlikely.

I guess we shall just have to wait and see…

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 have 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.