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…