If we’d gone into ‘lockdown’ three or four days earlier surely that could have stopped infections doubling at that point – on 16th March we were advised to avoid non-essential travel and not to go to pubs, gyms etc. but that meant those businesses were still open (albeit losing money). It took til 20th March before those businesses were ordered to close and the public instructed to stay at home.

That was a pivotal week and the half-hearted message on the 16th was the worst of both worlds in some respects.

Can we get Demonic Cummings to trend?

TiRed, looking at that sample you definitely need to drink more water!

In all seriousness, thanks for taking the time to post on here. More appreciated than a lot of us anxious numpties can express in words.

Sneaker Gimps

Plenty of information here:

https://covid19team.app/

Edit – looks like a potentially dodgy link but it isn’t.

+1. While TiRed’s posts might not always be what we want to hear, they’ve certainly helped me understand something about not just the virus but the response. Thankyou.

Black bananas

Discovered those in Iceland or Norway, I got some in Dutch packaging a few years ago online, they went down very well.

Possible confusion with streaming cold (no cough/temperature) which might also give those symptoms? Colds being deemed a bit less prevalent now?

Tad concerned as I get hayfever each year from mid June to early July which is usually bad enough to cause loss of smell/taste…

Cherry Ripe

If you work for northern I bet you know a mate of mine hes a driver trainer to…

Darren lives in bolton. Had a stroke a couple of years ago?

I know DS but haven’t really spoken to many of the classroom trainers for a while, we at the depots don’t normally have much to do with the school these days but I’m glad things worked out for him after what happened when he moved to those ratbags. The trainees I’ve had that trained with him speak very highly of him as I’m sure you’d expect.

Thanks very much. Who are you with? I’d be southeastern.

Northern (keep it quiet)…

Instructor Drivers here are quite busy and have been for a few years – see reports of driver shortages ad passim.
There have been classes of trainees every few months for years. Usually about a dozen per class, with a mix of different depots the trainees will be based at in each class. Northern have two training schools, one in Manchester and one in Leeds.

Re medicals, they’re fairly straightforward, hearing and eyesight can sometimes throw up surprises though. An entry medical will be ECG, blood pressure, physical mobility, urine check (plus D&A screening urine check), colour vision, visual acuity, hearing, general physical and mental health questions. Periodic medicals are every three years thereafter, every year after age 56 IIRC. Some types of laser eye surgery are permitted by some companies but it’s generally seen (sorry) as being a bit of a risk to your medical status if it doesn’t go quite right.

Medical standards guidance document available from the RSSB site – search for RIS-3451-TOM.

That fits in with my research. How long does training take?

It should take less than a year. Depending on how much of a backlog of training/shortage of instructors & managers there is it might take up to two years but that’s an exception.

Generally the classroom-based stuff at the start of the training takes the right amount of time, say four months, because it follows a syllabus. It’s when trainees come out for the latter stages (with the likes of me) working one to one for 230+ hours practical handling that it can fall down. Some places are pretty efficient, some really aren’t.

Salary at our place is £22k training then tiered once qualified or after 12 months in training (say if training gets drawn out) – if a trainee starts in January on £22k they might qualify in November, salary then goes up to c.£43k, then after another 12 months c.47k then after another year £54500 full rate.

Once you’ve qualified from being a trainee (‘passed out’) on your depot’s basic routes and traction types there’s usually more training to do to be fully conversant in everything routes and traction-wise that you’ll be expected to drive – at our place that takes a minimum of two years, usually more like 3-4.

From walking in off-the-street to passing out as a qualified but inexperienced driver it’s probably akin to doing it a degree-level course in 9-10 months. I expect trainees at the latter stages of training (when they’re with me) to do an hour or two study every day – in addition to being in work being supervised by me all day driving for full shifts and putting into practice everything they’ve learnt so far.

There are regular theory and practical assessments all through training, and the final competency assessment takes an average of about eight days.

Failure rate of trainee drivers is about 10%. It’s usually possible to tell the ones who will struggle within five minutes of meeting them. Any who fail will get a second chance at an assessment, but there are usually no third chances.

Most companies have ‘stood down’ trainee drivers due to the coronavirus and training is pretty much frozen, so recruitment for trainee drivers has also stopped. There will be a backlog building up but recruitment will probably start again late this year. External trainee driver jobs are advertised and then often pulled within days (or even hours) once the applicant response numbers are hit.

Once you’ve applied you’ll be sifted, successfuls will be invited to a recruitment event and/or driver manager interview.

If you pass that you’ll be invited to psychometric testing. This also includes a structured interview about past experiences of certain kinds and how you reacted in each case.

If you pass that you’ll be sent for a medical once a start date on a course is identified for you. The recruitment process can take many months, railway HR depts are constantly inundated and there’s always a ‘feast & famine’ approach to driver recruitment.

The early post about train driver on £40k basic, that’s a bit of a yarn – even Island Line are on more than that these days – either that or the person in question actually drives trams or is a ‘depot driver’ (restricted to the confines of a maintenance depot, never exceeds 5mph). Majority are on well over £50k now, with the top of the pile being Eurostar on ~£72k, and domestic being Avanti (formerly Virgin WC) on ~£67k.

It’s really not a job to do just for the money though. You really need an interest or you will either get trapped by the salary and hate it, or you will not be able to hack it in the first place. I’ve been a driver the best part of 20 years and I train train drivers for a living.

https://mobile.twitter.com/sarahcpr

Not seen any mention of Sarah Cooper here yet. We don’t need to see the orange lunatic himself now.

Plus I can imagine him choking on his own rage at this.

“I bought it [a gun], had to move…”

This, tell us more.

Eels – My Descent into Madness

Don’t bother the train operator, they’ll politely ignore you. You want the infrastructure company – that’s Network Rail, and that includes Scotland. ScotRail are just a train operating company and just run trains, it’s still Network Rail infrastructure up there.

Trespassing to interfere with vegetation management won’t be very well received. Similarly if you were to lop off a load of branches on your side then say this winter a storm fells the tree onto the running lines causing a serious incident I wouldn’t want to be you. Go through the right channels and they will sort it for you, they do this all the time. At least it’s not Japanese knotweed.

Vegetation maintenance

Railtrack has been extinct for a while. The ‘contact us’ box on that page might be a decent starting point, they should be able to point you in the right direction if they can’t get things logged (sorry) and moving themselves.

The railway will need rolling stock and other engineers for the foreseeable, as well as other roles especially operating staff.

How much has the UK’s weather and its effects on activity levels been taken into consideration with CV19 statistics / projections?

Train driver. Astonished at the fact that not enough is being done to stop idiots from travelling. We are only supposed to be running for key workers and absolutely essential travel.

There were rumours that British Transport Police were at Piccadilly station in Manchester and only letting key workers through into the station from the streets with proof (letter and/or ID) of their key worker status, no idea if that’s true but it needs to be done.

The only railway where metric is used routinely in GB is probably HS1. Everywhere else is almost exclusively based on imperial. The only measurements I’m aware of that are based on kilometres on the ‘normal’ GB network are the identification plates on recent overhead electrification masts – top two letters are route ID for electrification purposes*, middle two numbers are km along that route, lower numbers are structure number within that km. All older electrification ID plates are still in miles though as they were when constructed.

*These line of route IDs for electrification are different from the engineer’s line references (ELR) which are used for pretty much everything else. If you look at one of those emergency bridge plates with the phone number on a rail-over-road bridge you’ll see the ELR, structure number and possibly its measured mileage in miles and chains. Never km/metres.

Someone said railways are “just about clinging on” to imperial measurements. They’re far from just clinging on – most operational measurements on railways in GB are based on miles, chains, yards and inches.

Problems on Northern:

It’s a toxic, broken company in which every single department is hostile towards the others.

Training is abysmal. There’s no training resources – everything given to staff was produced by previous holders of the franchise apart from the CAF (builders of the new trains) training stuff put together by Northern which is laughably poor. About 80% of the problems with the CAF trains are user error. This is the first significant fleet of new trains ordered without a simulator for training and assessment. There is no manual given to drivers for these trains, they are instead told to carry their course notes around with them for reference. The course notes are shockingly poorly written and full of errors and omissions.

The actual build quality of the CAF trains is bad. Cab doors that come open at 100mph.
Door locks that need superhuman strength to open. AWS alarms that will cause drivers to fail their hearing tests on medicals they are so loud. Emergency alarm buttons that come off in your hand virtually every time. Wipers that last a month before expiring. The electric trains cause interference problems with the overhead lines even when they’re just stabled, affecting other trains.

Further to training, at some larger depots only a fraction of drivers are competent in their own rostered work, leading to rostering inefficiencies and the ‘shortage of drivers’ excuse. This is BS of the highest order – at one of the traincrew depots that’s the most afflicted, the number of drivers required (establishment) is 182 and the actual number of drivers, including a dozen trainees, is 228. By no stretch of the English language is that a shortage of drivers. It’s a shortage of competence. At that depot there are over 5,000 training days outstanding before all drivers are fully competent in their own work. This is a figure that was in only triple figures fifteen years ago.

Maintenance of trains – the largest maintenance depot used exclusively by Northern is at Newton Heath in Manchester. The entire culture there is, at best, patching things up so they never quite run out of work. Even the brand new trains are quickly filthy because the cleaners, and their supervisors and managers, are so used to spending a quarter of their allotted time or less performing their booked cleaning tasks that even a brand new train in service for a week looks filthy when it comes off depot because it’s never seen a hoover or a cloth, only a litter-pick. This culture is ingrained and I hope that the OLR lift the lid on Newton Heath depot in a meaningful way.

Arriva came in in 2016 with a franchise agreement that was unrealistic and an extremely aggressive fiscal management policy. There were huge cuts in budgets and industrial relations suffered. Don’t be taken in by the infrastructure projects being delivered late or not happening – Northern still had to, and did, put together a trainplan that was viable by way of the number of trains and staff they had to be able to ‘diagram’ them sufficiently. Unfortunately the number of trains out of service or failing in service due to poor maintenance causes the short-formed trains that make travelling a misery, and the fact only a fraction of the workforce are competent in a their rostered work leads to the huge inefficiencies and ‘shortages’ of drivers which are bunkum – while trains are cancelled with this excuse there are dozens of drivers sat playing cards in mess rooms unable to do their work because they’re not trained.

Wishywashyween.

Washing machine of course!

http://thetransportlibrary.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=67811

I’d be very careful about rail fare evasion these days. It’s quite easy to end up with a criminal record and/or a fine issued by the courts in the high hundreds. There’s a large forum which is predominantly for trainspotters and those of us ‘on the spectrum’ (so not unlike STW!) but it has an interesting section on ‘disputes and prosecutions’ which is well frequented by panicking desperate individuals who, say, had the audacity to get on a train without a ticket for whatever reason and are now facing big problems.

Absinthe – when Fab Cafe in Manchester started selling that in ’99 (ish) they quickly adopted a policy of no more than two per head, “because of the puke”.

One of the best bar rules I’ve seen were in a pub in Kuranda (Queensland) where you could ask to bar yourself if you so wished. Of course you could bar yourself from most places just by your behaviour, but this was a more gentlemanly approach.

Super Furry Animals – The Man Don’t Give a ****

OP – which level crossing? Let me know and I will do some digging as to whether there is a reason (eg local instruction). From what you describe though it seems excessive. I should add that I am an experienced driver instructor for the company concerned and am competent on the new trains, although I don’t drive them yet and they are only in service on routes I am not familiar with.

Train horns aren’t 140dB either.

Rail Group Standard

The Edinburgh Defence

Take him for neutering regardless?

Not surprised he booked sick at the end.

OP, from a neutral outsiders point of view, on the balance of probability you made the right decision all round.

“D’you want a flake in that, love?”

Had our kerb dropped in Worcs this year, they had recently changed so that a single private company deals with all correspondence, inspection and checks. Easy enough, basically fill in a form and send a cheque, but a tad pricey at £1350ish. The front garden had already been prepared (about 50m sq., gravel up to a small area of 1m-width block paving to separate the gravel from pavement). Considerations included what type of road was it (unclassified lane, hence no planning permission required), visibility of oncoming traffic/pedestrians and having no buried services in pavement (cost could have up to tripled if drains etc needed diverting).

If it is a pedestrian crossing just think how convenient it would be to press the button to stop traffic, allowing you effortless exit from your drive…

Bit of cling film folded twice, over your toes. Welcome.

Sticking my neck out here, but I would say that trainee drivers (of whom I have lots of experience training) who lack motivation and interest in the role will struggle with the job day-to-day. The shifts can be horrendous on freight (earlies? That will be any time after 00.01 – lates you might start any time up to 23.59) and your break might be in a freezing rancid cabin that is maybe one notch up from a bothy. We passenger drivers are seen as soft in comparison. Freight work is more interesting but the job uncertainty has put me off applying – there have been two recent big squeezes on freight drivers that have seen redundancies, in 2008 and this year since April (and ongoing).

Not much overtime on freight these days, the days of big ‘happy cheques’ seem to be behind us. Some big infrastructure projects (ie building HS2) will pay a fair few mortgages though.