Well folks, I’m now back at work properly and have completed my first full job which, I’m pleased to report, passed without incident. It was quite odd being back at the pointy end after such a long time off, but I’ve had plenty of opportunity to settle back into the routine before being allowed out on my own. In addition to the front-end turns that I did last week, I had the pleasure of a driver manager for company for the first half of yesterday’s job. I was due a ride anyway as part of my post-qualification assessment as well as a post-incident ride, so the two were combined and both dispatched at the same time.

Although I feel that I’ve dealt with the after effects of the fatality quite well, it has still left a discernable mark. I noticed yesterday that I have become very sensitive to and aware of people on station platforms, level crossings and footbridges. Consequently I was getting quite “horn happy” and blowing up at anything (including a plastic bag blown across Windmill Lane Crossing). I’m hoping that I’ll get used to people being around the railway the more that I drive, but at the moment I shall continue to employ a “better safe than sorry” approach and will continue to whistle whenever I feel the need.

It doesn’t help that fatalities are currently a hot topic of conversation among my colleagues at the moment as, unfortunately, there have been quite a few on our lines. In the five weeks since my incident we have averaged one incident per week with six people losing their lives, which is an incredibly high number for such a short space of time. We’ve also been under the media spotlight again as a direct consequence of the double fatality at a crossing near Angel Road . Since that particular incident, a number of drivers have reported seeing people loitering on the crossing and on the lineside which only increases the risk of another incident at the same location.

Today and tomorrow I have the same job, which includes a train prep in the carriage sidings. In one respect I’m quite looking forward to this, as I haven’t done a full train prep since the traction course last summer. I’m just glad that it’s on the beginning of the job, so I shall be going in early to make sure I’ve plenty of time.

While I was off work following my incident, I received a text message from my minder in which he called me “probably the unluckiest bastard on the railway”. I’m beginning to think that he’s right as, thinking back, I’ve had at least one thing happen every shift since passing out. Prior to that my luck had been pretty good, so I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this. It’s almost as if I’m walking around with the cosmic equivalent of a piece of paper with “kick me” written on taped to my back. I guess I should have been in for a bad time when I relieved the depot’s resident Harbinger of Doom off the Unit of the Beast (317 666) on Monday for my first drive on my own since my fatality, but things went so well. Perhaps the Fates were just lulling me into a false sense of security.

As mentioned in the previous entry, I had the same job twice in a row this week. It was actually quite a nice one with plenty of time allowed to carry out a thorough train prep before the unit was needed in the platform and I was needed
on the Stansted Express. However, it was a case of contrasts and similarities.

Train Prep

On Tuesday the unit to be prepped was full of litter but fault free, while Wednesday’s unit had at least been cleaned of litter but was labouring under a number of minor faults.

First Train

The first set of Stansted Express units I drove didn’t seem to want to go London, as they were down on power heading towards the capital but went like stink going back towards the airport. Even though I checked both units out at Liverpool Street , I couldn’t find a single thing wrong with them. Strangely this happened both days, even though I checked that they weren’t the same pair of units.

Second Train

The second pair of units driven after my break were fine, although I had to fail the train near Cheshunt on the way down to Stansted on Tuesday after losing traction interlock due to what later turned out to be a door fault in, you guessed it, the eighth carriage. I don’t think the punters were best pleased with facing the prospect of missing their flights, but I must have made a good enough show of looking exasperated and trying to get things moving again as they mercifully chose not to lay into me about it, even when I went past them the second time. I got given a different set of units for my final run down towards Stansted which behaved themselves, as did the set I had on Wednesday. However, I was keeping a beady eye on the interlock light the whole way just to be sure.

At least I can say that I’ve clocked up another first. On Wednesday I arrived at work to find my very first “please explain” in my pigeon hole asking for more information about the nature of the failure. I had guessed that this was coming, so I had already written a driver’s report form. In fact, I had written it while still on the unit that had caused me all the problems in the first place while waiting for the signaller to give me the road back to London .

Please let next week be incident free.

I’m not entirely sure exactly where to begin, as this week has been a bit of a rollercoaster. Fortunately my bad luck has held off for the duration, although I have been victim of the misfortune of others.

Monday started quietly enough, although I was treated to an unusual and slightly comical sight on my last run up to London . As I was approaching Tottenham Hale I noticed that a train was sitting stationary at an unusual location. As I got a bit closer, I could see that the driver was speaking on the radio to the signaller and looking upwards out of the cab window. It was only as I followed his gaze that I noticed what he was looking at. There, snagged in the overhead lines, was a bright orange toy balloon. As odd as it looked, I quite understood why he stopped. Even something as innocuous as this can bring down the overhead lines if it gets caught by a passing pantograph, so we have to keep an eagle eye out for such obstructions and stop short of any that we see. I had thought that this might mean a trip around the Southbury line for the first time since passing out, but the obstruction had been dealt with by then and I travelled along the booked route instead.

Someone else wasn’t quite so lucky on the following evening, as whoever was driving one of the last trains of Tuesday evening managed to bring down a large section of overhead lines at Hackney Downs. When I booked on the following morning I was informed of this and the fact that services were being diverted via Stratford, but I wasn’t aware of the impact of the event until I went to take my first train. Even though it came in at the expected time, it transpired that it wasn’t my train after all but the one fifteen minutes ahead. I did wonder why the driver seemed adamant that he wasn’t due for relief at that point, but a quick comparison of headcodes soon revealed the cause. The train that I eventually took over rolled in twenty minutes later. As a newly qualified driver I don’t yet sign all the routes we cover, which meant that I needed to be accompanied by another driver to guide me through Stratford . Sharing the cab again after getting used to being on my own took a while to adjust to, but it was nice to have someone to chat with while waiting for red signals to clear.

Disruption such as this has other pluses and minuses. On the minus side, each trip took far longer than was booked which meant having to deal with awkward passengers. However, so that a semblance of a service could be run the timetable got severely cut back which resulted in cancellations and fewer trains to be driven. By the end of my turn, I worked roughly the same amount of hours as I would have under normal circumstances, got home at the same time and yet did less driving. All in all it wasn’t a bad way to celebrate my birthday and certainly gave plenty to talk about.

Things got back to normal by Wednesday afternoon which meant that Thursday should have been a straightforward day. Unfortunately, I was the victim of other infrastructure problems. A failed signal on my first run cost me a hefty delay, and a points problem in the afternoon meant that I got the trip around the Southbury route that I missed on Monday. I was offered the Stratford alternative, but I was alone so had to decline. Even so, it worked out well. The train in front of me took the Stratford option and arrived at Liverpool Street more than ten minutes after me. As a result, I made my booked slot for my last run whereas I would have missed it if I’d gone by Stratford .

Unfortunately, the average of one incident per week resulting in a fatality is continuing. It started out as a bit of a joke, but it’s rapidly become a curse. It’s particularly poignant that the latest incident which happened this afternoon involved one of the drivers I trained with. If anything, I find this more shocking than having been directly involved in a fatality myself. Out of the five of us that qualified, two of us have already had a fatality in the two months since qualifying. These are staggering statistics that I am totally at a loss to explain. While such incidents are random in their nature, the number and frequency has got people wondering and asking questions.

Well folks, it’s the early hours of Wednesday morning and I’ve had a very rare occurrence. Today’s shift went almost entirely without hitch. I say almost entirely, as things didn’t go precisely as planned. However, given the dramas that I’ve suffered recently, being swapped off one pair of units and onto another was hardly dramatic.

The same couldn’t have been said about Sunday evening’s job, though. The first pair of units I took over were dreadful. The London-end unit was on half power only due to a traction motor fault suffered earlier in the day, while the country-end unit leaked rain into the driving cab like a sieve. Because the driving desk was awash with water and contains circuits energised at 110 volts DC, I refused to take the units back to the airport on the grounds of safety. Being a Sunday I had hoped that this would get me out of a round, but they had other ideas for me and asked if I could shunt the units separately into a vacant platform so that the formation would be reversed and the leaky cab “boxed-in”. This was all new to me, but the signaller talked me through the move so that it went smoothly. Sadly, I only managed to get halfway through the shunt when I was asked to take just the single unit that had been at the London end for my next working rather than completing the shunt. I agreed to this, but informed them that the unit was only on half power to which their response was “half power is better than no power”. It was by far the slowest run to the airport that I’ve ever done, which wasn’t helped by a lack of grip due to wet rails.

It seems that the spate of fatalities on our lines has not impressed on people just how dangerous the railways are. I had a terrible feeling of foreboding yesterday that there would be another one that evening, and that it could happen to me. This wasn’t helped any when I saw two young lads on the ‘Up’ side cess by Sawbridgeworth not more than a few metres from my train. Although I’m pretty poor at judging ages, I would have to guess that they couldn’t have been aged more than 10 and 8, and were probably brothers. Imagine what their mother must have felt if the Police had to go and break the news to her that her two boys had been killed because they had been trespassing on the railway. This, together with the number of fatalities and other mischief that we have experienced of late, is why I have chosen to display prominent links to the excellent Track Off website which aims to educate children and young people about the dangers posed by the railways.

Looking back over the past few entries, it seems that all I’ve done is whinge about how rotten my luck is and all the things that have gone wrong. Since then, things have been very quiet and I’ve just got on with my booked jobs with little in the way of incident. The problem with this (if it can be called such) is that there’s very little of interest to report.

That said, today was another one of “those days”. A fire overnight at Hackney Downs had knocked out the signalling in the immediate vicinity of the station which meant similar arrangements being put in place to when the wires came down at the same location a fortnight back. As I still don’t “sign” the Stratford route, I was almost left on the sidelines after the first part of my job was cancelled. This deficiency on my route card means that when such diversions are in force I am, as the supervisor put it, “as much use as mudflaps on a tortoise”. So, for the first hour or so I sat spare in the messroom. Unbelievably this was the first time ever that I’ve had to do this, and I was looking forward to getting away early. Typically, this state of affairs didn’t last as I was called on to relieve another driver and, by the time I’d got to London , there was enough signalling back on for me to continue with my booked job.

Prior to all this excitement, I have been getting stuck in with the punters. Mostly it’s been pointing out which train goes where or just confirming that the train with the orange “Stansted Express” branding is in fact the Stansted Express and that, yes, it does indeed go to London. However, there have been a few more challenging queries that I despatched with aplomb. Although it isn’t really part of my job I actually enjoy the contact with people, especially as the driving itself can be fairly solitary experience. If only the managers who took my induction last year could have seen me, their little hearts would have burst with pride.

My workload should be getting more varied soon, as I’ve been informed that I have almost completed my twenty solo turns and will be out route learning next week. In some respects, I’m surprised that I’ve not yet done the twenty turns as it seems to have taken ages. Admittedly, taking a little leave after qualifying plus the previous unpleasantness at Clapton has padded things out a fair bit, but even so…. By the summer I should have completed my route card and will be a fully fledged driver, albeit still a probationer. However, route learning does mean that I shall be away from driving for a little while until it’s completed. I shall just have to make sure I make the most of the last few core route jobs while I’ve got them.

It’s gratifying to say that things have been very quiet of late. I completed the last of my twenty solo turns without incident and am now out learning the rest of the routes that will eventually make up my workload.

So far I’ve been learning the Enfield Town and Hertford East branches, which are both pretty straightforward. However, from Monday I shall be starting to learn the routes around Stratford which will culminate the week after with the hefty stretch of line from London Liverpool Street to Seven Kings, which I’m assuming will include Ilford depot. However, on Wednesday of next week I shall have the mother-of-all route exams, as I attempt to sign three routes in a single day. Admittedly it’s far from ideal, but it’s just happened that way because of the way that my rest days and annual leave have fallen.

In the meantime, I’ve been kicking back and enjoying the sunshine whilst on my rostered week of leave. It’s a bit inconvenient that it’s fallen where it has, but it’s been nice to have a long lie-in and catch up on those niggling little jobs that I’ve been studiously ignoring whilst at work.

Since last I wrote, I’ve been engaged in almost continual route learning and one by one ticking off each of the routes that I shall be required to drive. Unlike some of my colleagues, I’ve not been taken off from time to time to cover driving jobs, which is both good and bad. On the good side, it means that I can concentrate on the job in hand without any distractions and will hopefully be able to rattle off all the routes in short order.

On the negative side, I am beginning to feel that the pace is perhaps a little too fast for my own liking. My preference would be to learn a route and then, having “signed” it, get a chance to drive over that route a few times on my own so that I can start to become properly familiar with it before moving onto the next one. Admittedly I do already have the advantage of having driven almost all of our routes several times when out with my minder. In addition, not everyone feels the same way as me, with a few mentioning that they are perfectly happy with the pace of learning.

Even so, I have raised this as an issue with the managers and, to their credit, they are taking my request seriously. I have already had one day next week when I was rostered to be learning the line north to Cambridge changed to a driving job which will see me out on my own at Hertford East and at Ilford depot, and I have been promised that there will be more before I have to knuckle down again to learn Cambridge.

Beyond that, there’s not been much to report. I’ve only had a handful of driving jobs since my last entry, and those that I have had have passed relatively uneventfully. That’s not to say that things have been quiet on our lines. Our unlucky streak has continued over the past few weeks with repeated issues affecting the overhead electrification. By my reckoning there have been four cases of “de-wiring” and one failed booster transformer, all of which have required the current to be isolated for varying periods of time. There has also been a freight train derailment to contend with, together with the usual problems that plague us from time to time. Thankfully there have been no further fatalities.

I’ve been quite a busy bunny of late. I have now “signed” all the routes with the exception of Cambridge , and have been back out driving again. As promised, I have been enjoying a much more varied workload, with trips out to Stratford , Ilford and Hertford East. I do still get the occasional Airport turn, but it’s no longer my staple work.

Of course, being back in the cab means that I’ve been directly involved with the fun and games that have been going on. By far the most amusing incident involved an emergency speed restriction that has been put in on the ‘Down’ Suburban line at Bethnal Green station. Once Network Rail knew that it was required, it should have been a simple matter of putting out the relevant lineside signs on each line, but oh no. What started off as a single board facing the wrong way on the ‘Down’ Main soon escalated into a farce of huge proportions.

When I called it in to the signaller, he informed me that he’d already been told and that someone was going out to sort it. Sure enough, as I left London I saw a track worker doing the honours. I did feel a little sorry for him as I went by, as he was stranded out in the middle of a six track stretch of line with trains whizzing by on all sides. I don’t suppose that it helped that me on the ‘Down’ Suburban and an Anglia driver on the ‘Down’ Main both whistled him up at exactly the same time while another train approached in the other direction along the ‘Up’ Suburban. For the lack of anywhere better to stand, he just flattened himself against the boards he was adjusting and hoped for the best. Even though he was obscuring them, I wasn’t sure that he hadn’t made matters worse by turning all three boards on that post around. As I passed by the same spot again almost two hours later I could see that this was exactly what had happened, so I called it in for a second time. The signaller was incredulous and sounded not a little pissed off with the news, but I had no idea why. I only learned yesterday that the reason for this was that it had taken six attempts to get these boards facing the right way, and even then this only happened because they sent out a different bloke at the sixth attempt.

That’s not to say that I’ve been above such matters myself. I almost had a stand-up row with the signaller on the Harlow workstation because I had convinced myself that I had the wrong headcode. He was right of course, but I was out of his area before I’d realised my mistake. I blame the 5am start and the similarity between the “6” on my outbound headcode and the “9” on my return trip, so skipped ahead to the headcode of my next working. What a twit…!! I’ve not heard anything more about it, so I presume he had a laugh about it with his colleagues but did nothing more about it.

Well, it’s been an unusual day for me today. The job I was on today required me to travel as a passenger on almost as many trains as I had to drive. However, the sun was out and I was in a good mood, so everything went swimmingly. Perhaps it was the weather that put everyone in a better mood than normal and made them better disposed towards everyone else, as more people were seen to be smiling and taking the time to stop and talk. I even had a few “thank you’s”.

The first train I worked was what I jokingly call “the school bus”, as it is used heavily by children on their way home from school. They had obviously invented a little game to see who was the bravest and could stay off the train the longest at each stop without getting left behind. They must have had a great deal of practice, as they evidently knew exactly how long the door hustle alarms sound for before the doors themselves start to close. No matter how far they had strayed from the train when I made to close the doors, they always managed to get back on.

Of course, when the weather’s hot we begin to feel the heat. Driving around with the windows open can be tricky, as it makes the cab very noisy. Two trips like that and I realised that the hearing in my left ear had been temporarily deadened. It wasn’t a problem when in the train as I could still hear all the cab systems, but it became noticeable the moment I sat down in a quiet spot for a break (although everything returned to normal within a few minutes). So, it was cab vent only after that. These are generally brilliant when you’re belting along, but they have no filters on them. Consequently anything that gets scooped up from the outside is spat straight into the cab. It is for this reason that they are sometimes referred to as “wasp dispensers”. Wasps weren’t my problem today, but midges were. Each time I swatted one another would appear as if by magic. On the return trip, I made sure I kept everything closed so that at least one cab remained a mozzie-free haven. Thankfully by then the evening was beginning to cool down. Now that’s what I call dispensing the unpleasantries!

I’m afraid that I’ve come over all “Bill Oddie” after yesterday, having spent the day on our suburban lines.

A combination of the good weather and slower trains meant that I got to see some of the wildlife that makes it’s home along the verges of the railway. Chief amongst these is the urban fox. Normally I don’t much care for them as I don’t consider them as noble as their rural cousins. Somehow I can’t believe that ransacking people’s bins for leftovers is an honest way to earn a living. However, on this particular day they were at leisure and variously playing with their cubs in the cess or just lounging around sunning themselves (including one particularly bold individual lazing on the platform at Highams Park in the middle of the day).

Unfortunately, the day was not a complete oasis of tranquility, as there were two springs that I evidently weren’t watching closely enough. I was just leaving Liverpool Street when the spring that I thought was pushing the rubber door stop onto the floor decided it needed a break and allowed the cab door to swing in towards me. As it wasn’t something that I’d expected to happen it caught me a little off-guard and, as an impulse, I stuck my hand out to stop it slamming shut on me. However, in doing so I must have momentarily released the DSD allowing the spring to break the circuit. Being as I was driving a Class 315 at the time, it had me in an instant as the brakes jammed on hard. So, there I was stuck like a lemon half in and half out of Liverpool Street station and blocking up all the trains on that side while waiting for the two minute time-out to expire so that I could get the brakes off and be on my way. I felt so embarrassed that I just wanted the ground to open up and swallow me.

All of this was quite enough for one day, so I was glad that I’d already finished by the time that torrential rain hit. It apparently caused a fair bit of chaos because the line flooded at various points. In the meantime, I was having my own problems trying to find a parking space in the shallow end of Tesco’s car park.