Well folks, the end is almost upon me. I have finished the required hours with my minder and am now facing the final assessment to prove my competence (or otherwise) as a train driver.

The euphoria was almost spoiled on Friday night when a fight broke out on our train. I’d only just started rolling down the platform at Liverpool Street with the last train of the day to Hertford when there was the sound of shouting and clumping around from the front coach. We stopped the train pretty sharpish and opened the doors to deal with the situation before we were happy to continue. Turns out that an abusive passenger decided that he was going to have a pop at an off-duty Special Constable (after having been shown his ID). If that wasn’t enough to qualify him for the “Twit of the Day” award, he chose to do it on one of only two trains currently fitted with CCTV. Needless to say he was forcibly ejected from the train by station security and did not get home that night.

The other fly in the ointment stems from my upcoming assessment, part of which is to “sign” our depot’s core route. Having spoken to the chaps in the office, it would seem that I’m also going to be expected to “sign” an additional diversionary route at the same time. I was a bit annoyed as I hadn’t been warned about this in advance, but it seems that they’ve got me over a barrel. I was intending to tell them that I’m not ready and request a couple of extra days to learn the route, but they’ve made it clear that doing this will delay my passing out as a qualified driver. What rankles the most is that they’ve done it in a rather underhand way. While they haven’t said that this extra route is part of the core requirement, they have said that I won’t be assessed until I’m ready to “sign” both routes and that requesting extra days for route learning will mean that my assessment will be rescheduled for a later date.

I can understand why they expect this, especially if the main route is blocked for whatever reason (as it was today). Plus, as it’s not such a tricky route to learn, I’m half inclined to just do it. However, I do feel that it’s extremely cheeky of them to spring this on me at very short notice. I think that a chat might be in order to clear this one up. Either way, I might be able to blag an extra day or two depending on how things pan out for the rest of this week.

Well, my ordeal starts tomorrow afternoon with as assessment of my knowledge of PTS (remember that…?) and the core route, and will last several days. Hopefully by the end of next week I shall be passed out as a fully-fledged driver.
Wish me luck!!

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 fulfill 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, particularly 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.

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. For 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…

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…