As is often the case this time of year, there was a wee bit of fog about yesterday evening which made for a new experience.

Unfortunately, due to railway lines having to be fairly flat they were often built in the bottoms of river valleys close to water, making them prone to becoming fog-bound. Our route is no different, following, as it does, the course of the Lea and Stort all the way from Clapton to beyond Bishops Stortford. So thick was the fog that you couldn’t see one end of Broxbourne station from the other, and anything that wasn’t illuminated was totally invisible. Braking points were obscured and stations only loomed out of the murk at the last minute, which made stopping at stations a hit and miss affair. Imagine holding a sheet of grey paper 6 inches from the end of your nose and then running at the world at 85mph, and you’ll get a fair idea of what it was like. However, in my case I was running at the world in 250 tons of train with several hundred people on board. Even so, I still managed to complete a run down to the Airport in 42 minutes, observing all speed restrictions.

I was at least lucky enough that the job started with several trips on the Stansted Express. Not having to worry about stopping at places meant that I could check out how bad conditions were and how visible (or otherwise) my braking points would be if I were stopping. I was glad of having had that opportunity for when I had to finish the job with a round of slow stopping services to the airport. On the flipside, I did have a worry about station duties which I hadn’t encountered before: It can be quite hard to judge when to close the doors when the rear of the train is partially obscured by fog.

I’m pleased to report that my regular minder was back yesterday, and managed to complete the job without falling off his chair.

Boy, what an interesting evening. I have counted myself quite lucky that everything so far has gone well and I’ve not had to deal with any problems. However, all that went out of the window today.

It all started innocuously enough, with a pulled passcom (communication cord) on my first run up to London . Thankfully it was at a booked station stop and was almost certainly done by a group of teenagers in the rear coach as they got off the train. This was simple enough to rectify, but it still lost a couple of minutes.

After that it all went quiet until the last trip of the evening down to Hertford. We got cautioned by the signaller out of Cheshunt because a train a couple of slots ahead of us had hit a sofa that had been placed on the mainline. Even when we got to the location, there were still cushions and tatters of fabric littering the lineside, but nothing much resembling furniture. Once onto the branch we managed to pick up a group of hardened door-pullers who proceeded to make my life a misery. My minder then had an entertaining ten minutes chasing them away while I changed ends. With a bit of maneuvering, some technical shenanigans with the unit and the sound of an emergency service vehicle siren nearby (nothing to do with us), we managed to get away and leave the little (ahem) whatsits behind.

All of this got the old adrenalin going and has left me wondering if I’m cut out for that side of the job. Because we don’t have guards or conductors on our trains, everything is down to the driver. Problem is that there’s enough in the driving to keep me busy without having to worry about keeping the peace also. Without an imposing minder I’m not sure how I would have coped with this situation on my own, as I’m quite a timid person and slightly built which leaves me wary of confronting trouble head-on. In some perverse way, it would be good to expose myself to more experiences like this while I have the back-up of a minder so that I can develop strategies of my own. However, I could quite happily manage without the aggro.

Either way, I’m pretty certain that I wouldn’t have tackled tonight’s problems the same way as my minder did. It’s just not my style.

I am very pleased to report that I and my colleagues have finally finished the last part of classroom training that our job requires. From here on, we are no longer under the auspices of the Hornsey training school.

This last part was a SPAD Awareness and Route Risk course. I was initially worried how they were going to make this last a whole week without resorting to saying “Don’t go past the red ones” really slowly. However, it was quite in depth and looked at all manner of factors that can affect a driver’s performance and could contribute to an incident. It’s not just about poorly sited signals and the like, but could be environmental (e.g. sun affecting a signal), external (e.g. something more interesting happening just off the railway) or internal (e.g. mental and physical preparedness). From studying some actual incidents, it’s quite sobering to realise how something with the potential to cause major havoc can have its root in something so small and minor that it could easily be overlooked. It certainly gave me food for thought.

Today was supposed to be back at the pointy end putting all the theory into practice. It’s been four weeks since I’ve been with my regular minder, so I was quite looking forward to picking up from where we left off. Sadly, we didn’t get very far through the job before the wheels fell off that particular wagon. After leaving Tottenham Hale on a ‘Down’ Stansted Express service my minder was taken ill. After a quick conflab with the depot we called a halt at Broxbourne, turfed all the punters off and sat blocking the ‘Down Main’ until my minder was carted off in an ambulance and I was met by a driver manager so that I could take the train back to London . Given all the other things that were going wrong this morning, it was just one more thing to be dealt with. On the downside it does mean that I’m going to be back to square one in terms of getting any driving in the coming weeks, especially since another group of trainees have started with minders taking up all the spare men. I guess I can but wait and see.

Hope he’s alright…

Given today’s date, I would have thought that we would have been well into the throes of autumn by now. However, when I look out of my window all I can see are ranks of trees covered in lush green leaves. Even today’s high winds have failed to dislodge very many. We’re supposed to be deep into “silly season”, and yet there’s hardly been any problems.

Although the leaves are resolutely staying put, there has been quite a bit of slipping going on caused by wet rails. This isn’t helped much by Network Rail treating the tracks with high pressure water jets to blast the leaves off the railhead. I suspect that I was following one of these treatment trains yesterday evening while driving an ‘all stops’ service to Stansted Airport . All was fine until after we had left Broxbourne (a known starting point for treatment trains), but I had awful trouble getting going again at every stop after that. In fact, I would be lucky to get 50mph before having to brake for the next station, even where the stations were well spaced apart.

That said, it was much better today. I even took advantage of being in charge of an empty train to practice some “panic stops”. There wasn’t even the merest hint of a slip, even when braking hard in step 3 (which we are encouraged not to use for routine braking). There was even plenty of grip to get away from station stops. I don’t expect this situation to last for very much longer but, while the weather remains mild, the leaves won’t be much of a problem.

In other news, punter power came to my rescue the other day. I’d been lumbered with an 8 car Stansted Express train which had a set of dodgy doors on both sides, meaning that they needed to be shut by hand before leaving every station. This wasn’t too much bother at the airport or at Liverpool Street where there were plenty of platform staff to assist, but at Tottenham Hale there was no-one to help us. Thankfully, on one trip, I was just considering whether to get out and sort the doors myself when I saw a passenger step forward and do the honours, allowing us to get on our way. What a lovely man.