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 the 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 was 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.

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.

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 horribly affected as a result.