Things have been fairly quiet of late, so there hasn’t been much to report. I’ve been shuttling up and down the West Anglia routes at the control of various services, making my stops, doing PA announcements and generally keeping out of the way. It’s been quite nice. There was one day last week when the (ahem) excrement hit the airscrew which resulted in some impressive delays and one of our trips to Enfield being cancelled, but that’s about it.

Unfortunately, this week I have been chopped and changed around a fair bit because my minder is unwell. In the last three days I’ve had two different minders and will have yet another tomorrow, this time from a different depot. At least it’s kept me out there driving, as I had feared that I’d be bumped back down to front-end turns again, but it’s meant that I’ve had to get acquainted with new minders and they with me. Still, it’s quite nice to have my driving assessed by other people as well as my regular minder so that I can get a balanced view on my progress.

Hopefully by the time I get back from my week off (to which I am very much looking forward) my minder will be well again.

Well, it’s finally happened. I’ve failed a train. Given my previous ‘Jonah Complex’ I’m surprised it’s taken this long. It was actually something of an anticlimax when it finally happened. Predictably it had to be a door fault on a Class 315 rather than anything more spectacular, but safety first…!!

We were at Hackney Downs on our way down to Hertford East when I noticed that people were having trouble getting into the leading coach and that the orange hazard light on the side of the carriage was not coming on. Given the number of times you have to shout “Press and hold” at punters because they can’t operate the door buttons correctly and the frequency with which hazard lights fail, I initially though nothing of it. However, the minder I was with jumped out at the next stop to investigate and found that there was no door release on that coach at all. A phone call to control later, and I’m turfing everyone out at Seven Sisters, changing ends and heading back to London empty as the unit cannot continue in service.

Ironically, I’d just been speaking to another trainee before setting out who was telling me that he had lost all his main air after hitting a large bird between Ware and Hertford East (he wasn’t sure whether it was a swan or a goose). Perhaps I should have taken that as an omen and gone to somewhere less risky, like Enfield Town . Still, it meant that I got a nice early finish to round the day off. What a result!!

Actually, there are only ‘treats’ to report so far.

Last week, the wife and I had ourselves a little holiday in a cottage in the Highlands of Scotland. The idea was that we would rest, relax and recharge our batteries after what has seemed a very long and busy year so far. From my own perspective, it was just the tonic I needed.

Today’s turn was my first one after our break, and I was feeling a little nervous. However, I didn’t need to worry as the job was a nice gentle one to ease me back into driving. A round each to Chingford and Hertford East, then empties to Ilford. It was the same job that I observed from the secondman’s side a few weeks back (see Funky Moves: Friday 9th September) but, from the driver’s side, it wasn’t quite as hard as I’d expected. With the exception of one that is hidden behind a bridge, it was actually quite easy to see which signal applies to which line and where everything goes. They are even nice enough to throw in an extra double yellow aspect to compensate for the tight signal spacing between Stratford and Ilford. Even so, there is still plenty going on that can cause distraction and a fair bit to learn before I could ever ‘sign’ that route, especially with all the possible moves that can be made around Stratford and the length of line signalled for bi-directional movements.

I’m still not back with my own minder though, as he’s now on leave. Still, this week’s minder seems nice enough and pretty much just left me to get on with things, which I’m taking as something of a compliment.

Having had the ‘treat’ I think the ‘trick’ comes later in the week, as it looks like I’ll be rushing about on airports and suburbans.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.