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.

Apologies for the lack of recent updates. I haven’t vanished off the face of the earth (well, not yet anyway).

It would seem that the endless practice that we had earlier this month has stood us in good stead, as we all passed our traction assessments (and not before time). Thanks to the excellent preparation that we had received at Hornsey, the biggest challenge facing us was how to avoid getting sunstroke or, for those who had their assessment on the Friday, getting soaked to the skin.

Unlike all the other assessments we’ve had so far, the traction assessment is a two part affair with a written and a practical part. The other difference was that, while the written part was administered at the Hornsey training school by our instructor, the practicals take place at the driver depots and are carried out by driver managers. Even so, both parts were fairly relaxed affairs.

Now that the traction course is complete, we have reached the end of the main classroom phase of the training. Although there are a couple more courses that we need to take, the emphasis is now on getting some hands-on experience. For two weeks starting from today we are allowed out with an empty train to play on the mainline between Cambridge and Stansted Airport . At last, we have started to actually drive trains. It was quite a weird experience being able to drive at up to 90mph with other trains around and having to obey signals and speed restrictions when all we’ve been used to so far is pootling about in the depot.

My own driving turn was fairly unspectacular. Taking over the train at Newport on our way up to Stansted Airport , I was only able to attain a maximum of 70mph. However, I did make a pretty good fist of stopping at the 8 car board at Elsenham and only ran a few feet past the DOO monitors. It’s going to take a little while to get used to the way that the train handles and how to control it, but I feel we’re well on the way. The only small fly in the ointment was a sour-faced Central Trains driver who was waiting for us to clear Stansted North Junction so that he could get the road up to Cambridge . He couldn’t have been there for very long, but he certainly made sure I was aware that he wasn’t a happy chap. I shall have to look out for him tomorrow.

At least I don’t have to buy the cream cakes tomorrow, unlike two unfortunates who failed to cancel the AWS in time.

Since last week’s entry there’s not been much to report. It would seem that we have now covered all of the required knowledge on our basic traction and are spending our time mopping up any points that we feel we don’t fully grasp and endlessly practicing things like coupling and uncoupling units, train prep and fault finding.

Although the practice is good and helpful to get the various procedures set in our minds, I’m just beginning to get a little bored with the course. I guess I’m just getting a bit impatient now. Maybe I’m overdue a break. We’ve all started talking wistfully about the possibility of taking some leave so that we might be able to have a holiday. If there is one criticism that I could level at the structure and administration of the driver training programme it is that each element of the training follows hard on the heels of the one before and there’s no chance to stop and have a breather. There’s an awful lot of hard work involved in taking on board and understanding all this new information, and I know that I’m beginning to feel tired.

Hopefully there will be an opportunity for some time off once we get to the minder driving stage, but that isn’t due to start until mid-September. Until then we’ll keep soldiering on.

Yesterday was the day that I and my classmates had been waiting for all these months. Almost four months after starting employment with the company we got our first taste of driving.

OK, so the journey only lasted about 300 yards and did not exceed 5mph, but it still felt like a major milestone to us all. I can’t say that I was too worried or overawed by the experience as it was in the safe confines of Hornsey depot. The first time out on the mainline will be a different matter, though. Naturally we all made our fair share of silly learners mistakes like forgetting to reset the DRA and getting muddled up with the directions in which the brake and power controllers move, but no-one dropped the DSD (except at the instructors prompting) or bashed into anything. The other thing that we also all failed at was correctly picking braking points to correctly stop at chosen landmarks, but that will come with experience.

Today’s driving exercises were a bit more practical as we practiced coupling and uncoupling, or “controlled collisions” as the instructor called them. Hopefully with practice the various stages of each operation will gradually sink in and the elementary errors will stop.

It seems that I was right about my reputation within the group as a train breaker sticking. Although I’ve had no further incidents, I’m still referred to as a Jonah.

In fact, this particular title could just as easily apply to one of our number who got a bit keen when exploring the differences between the Mark 1 version of the Class 317 and the slightly less old Mark 2. Despite warnings that the units we were exploring had been prepped for service and that we should leave them exactly as we’d found them, he noticed that the passcoms were different and decided to pull one. Cue several minutes of consternation as his group tried to work out how to reset it. Unfortunately, being the first I fear that this is not going to be enough to shift the attention away from myself.

Away from the diverting subject of breaking trains, we’ve been getting down to the minute details of our units. As a commuter I’d always dismissed them as being old, basic and a bit naff but, as a trainee driver, I’m learning a new respect for them from their hidden complexities. For example, I’d never known that the air suspension could sense the weight of each coach and automatically adjust the brake pressure in each brake step accordingly. That this is all done by air without any electronic intervention is quite amazing.

The flip side to this is that there are some daft design touches, particularly in relation to the positioning of air isolation cocks. Some units have an internal and external cock for some air systems, but these are in different places in the circuit for each system. Some parts of the air system don’t have an isolating cock at all which would require the isolation of the entire coach from the rest of the train in the event of an air leak (e.g. the supplementary main air reservoir on Mark 2 units). A bigger headache is the positioning of a passenger bulkhead inside refurbished Mark 2 units which makes access to the isolation cocks all but totally impossible.

Still, it’s nice to be outside in the fresh air after all those weeks stuck inside a classroom all the time. It certainly makes things a lot easier to understand when you can go out to a unit and see the systems and practice the procedures (or “play”, as our instructor would have it).

Having spent all yesterday looking at the dirty underside of a Class 317, we spent most of today inside the unit looking at cocks. It all sounds a little bit sordid but, in order to pass our traction training, we need to know all about them. The cocks in question related specifically to the pantograph and the other equipment up on the roof that carries out the job of collecting juice from the overheads.

It all seemed fairly straightforward when the trainer was there to explain everything, but it is beginning to dawn on me the extent to which traction is much more abstract than the rules course was. For example, there are quite a few different things that could prevent you raising the pantograph and not many indications to help you track down exactly where the problem might be. At least with some of the rules questions if you didn’t actually know the answer you could deduce most of them. Unfortunately it seems that, at this point at least, I’m going to have to put in a lot of effort to learn each part.

At least I’ve managed to get my first train fault out of the way quickly. Once we’d all had a go at cutting in the auxiliary power and raising the pantograph under supervision and been shown the whereabouts of the various MCB’s and isolating cocks, we were all going to have a go at doing this unsupervised. Being nearest the cab I went first. All went swimmingly with the pantograph going up and giving power until *phutt*, and out went all the lights. At first I thought I’d been stitched up but tried again anyway with the same result. I realised later what I should have done (press ‘Aux Set’ and ‘Pan Up’ together), but by then it was too late. The others wouldn’t let me off the unit until last in case I broke the steps as well. I have a nasty feeling that this might have been a reputation forming event.

The first day of the traction course was a real breath of fresh air after being stuck inside a classroom doing rules.

After some quick pieces of admin, we were lead outside for what seemed to be the first time in absolutely ages and allowed to wander around the outside of our basic traction, the Class 317 EMU. Even though we are only looking at and identifying all the mucky bits below floor level that the carriage washers never reach, it was still interesting and very informative. Once we’ve covered a bit more about the various air and electrical systems and how they all relate to each other I’m sure it will begin to make sense, but I’m not worrying about that at the moment.

I must remember to buy either some disposable latex gloves and/or wet wipes before I go out driving in case I have to isolate anything in service.

Since ending our rules course, our numbers have also swelled from six to eight, which is nice. I’m not sure quite how well the two new guys will fit in with the rest of us, as we’ve become quite a close-knit group. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

I’m a very happy chappy today, as I have passed my rules exam. Having actually sat the exam yesterday I spent most of last night as a ball of nerves until I heard the outcome this morning by text message from our trainer.

One of the things that I was most worried about was that there appeared to be a couple of spurious questions in the last weekly assessment where the expected answer was different from that given in the handouts and, in one notable case, the Rule Book. It was all a bit hard to explain, especially given that the bloke who wrote the course material also wrote the assessments and is supposed to be hot on rules. It certainly made me worry whether there would be any similarly ‘odd’ questions in the final exam.

The question that caused all the problems was: “If your train is involved in a train accident what are your four main priorities?” The handout listed them in the following order:

• The passage of trains is stopped on each obstructed line.
• The signaller is informed and the emergency services are summoned if required.
• Carry out protection where required.
• Ensure the passengers are safe.

As we had all studiously learnt this, this is what we all wrote on our assessments. When we got them back we were amazed to see that contacting the signaller had been relegated to below carrying out protection. When I checked the Rule Book it backed up our conviction that we had answered this question correctly, as Module M1 says that emergency protection is only required if the signaller cannot provide protection by any other means or you are unable to contact the signaller. If you waited to contact the signaller until you had carried out protection it’s likely that he’d be doing his pieces trying to work out why you’d stopped and be trying to contact you himself.

Still, while we all understood what we would actually do should this scenario ever arise, we were smart enough to know to give the answer that was expected of us so that we got through the assessment.

Although the thought of being passed competent is a little scary, having completed this part of my training I shall be kicking back and relaxing tonight. If I may be forgiven a little immodesty, having been asked a total of 452 assessment questions throughout the duration of this course, I’m hugely chuffed to have only had eight marked for review.

The real world came crashing into the classroom in the most jarring of manners today following the terrorist attacks on London ‘s transport network.

Although we were shielded from the full impact of these atrocities by distance, the knock-on affect on the railways were still felt. We managed to struggle on with our training for a while (which, ironically, was on train accidents, emergency protection and train evacuation), but we had to give up after our trainer vanished at the behest of the depot manager. Instead, we drank tea in the messroom and watched events unfold on TV in the company of many ‘one’ and WAGN drivers. After a while we were told that we might as well go home, and so we did.

Being serious, I just don’t have the words to express the sadness and outrage that I feel as a result of these attacks. The deliberate targeting of innocent civilians at the height of the peak is nothing short of cowardly and simply cannot be justified to further any agenda. However, I do feel a lot of pride and admiration towards the railwaymen and women of all grades on both National Rail and London Underground who did sterling work today to ensure that a bad situation was not made any worse. I honestly can say that I feel honoured to be joining a profession that conducts itself in this way and just hope that, should the time ever come, I can measure up to the example that was set today.