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!!