Guest Blog: A train driver responds

Thursday 8th August 2024

My recent post about The way ahead for buses and trains attracted a large response of more than 80 comments. I’m sure not every reader reads through every comment, particularly those added a few days after the original post, so today I’m reprinting a comment left by an anonymous train driver as a Guest Blog to give it a wider audience. He or she speaks with personal experience and answers two points someone else raised in an earlier comment as well as very aptly illustrating the point I made in the original post about the rail industry’s current biggest (and not talked about enough) challenge: driver availability.

Here’s the comment as posted:

Why is a position that pays £60,000 per annum short of people?

There are a whole host of reasons, starting with the weird and wonderful requirements companies have when recruiting into any role nowadays; I suspect far too many viable candidates fall or give up at the first hurdle because it’s just not worth the hassle.

Medical requirements for train driving are onerous and fail far more people than they pass. 

Then you start looking at the job itself.

Shift patterns are bad (not as bad as the bus industry, to be fair, but let’s not compare apples with oranges) which mean that a lot of people simply won’t consider them – you’d be amazed how many drop out when they realise that, yes, trains on Saturdays (let alone Sundays!) need crews. And yes, you’ll be working anti-social hours, you don’t get bank holidays, you get allocated your holidays each year (yes, you can swap with other staff, but…), the standard shift pattern is a week of “earlies” followed by a week of “lates”, although “earlies” just means starting before midday and “lates” just means you don’t start early morning (I’ve known “late” duties starting at 0730), and the weekly switchover means you can finish at 0300 Sunday morning after a shite Saturday evening shift and be back at 0300 Monday morning with your sleep pattern totally screwed. 

Driving itself is boring. You have a throttle lever and a brake lever (sometimes combined) and that’s pretty much it. Other than that you have little to do beyond monitoring the outside world and being expected to respond instantly something happens despite being bored stupid. What you don’t have are the constant inputs you have when driving on the roads: you’re not steering, you’re not constantly monitoring other road users, and so on.

Whilst being bored stiff, there’s always the knowledge in the back of your mind that you have the responsibility for potentially hundreds of lives; it takes a certain personality to be able to compartmentalise that and not be distracted by it.

You’re given a long training course where you get taught loads of stuff – I felt like I could strip an engine down lineside if needed at the end of my training – but you’re not allowed to use any of it. A TOC I used to work for had signs in the cabs saying “In the event of train failure do not carry out fault finding. Contact control for advice” – even checking to see if a circuit breaker had tripped was banned! It’s demoralising.

Welfare facilities are poor; the railway considers a room with 20 seats for up to a hundred staff, a single kettle for everyone, a single microwave and “access to a toilet” to be a reasonable break facility even if it’s in a yard in the middle of nowhere or half-a-mile from the station you arrived at – and you’ll be given the bare minimum time to get there and back, which means inward delays will result in outward delays. Delays are demoralising too, especially as you’ll rarely know why there was a delay.

Timetabling is poor and getting worse. The last company I worked for brought in a brand new timetable created by external consultants which deleted allowances based on decades of local adjustments and also ignored all infrastructure requirements such as time allowed for level crossing operation at stations – if it takes over a minute for the barriers to activate, lower and the signal to clear then it’s useless scheduling the train to have a 30-second stop. Who was it who got phone calls after every trip demanding to know why the trains lost time? Yep, the drivers. The guards had it worse: they were getting phone calls during the trip taking them away from their other duties such as customer service. Strangely the company refused to accept that the timetable was simply wrong.

I wonder whether the unions have a straightjacket on the training regime to protect their bargaining power? 

No, they don’t. The unions have zero say over what training regime the companies introduce. 
The companies choose to do the bare minimum of recruitment and training they can get away with, and from experience they do stupid things like transferring work from depot A to depot B without first training staff at depot B, meaning depot A ends up covering the work plus travelling time and it takes twice as many drivers as before. Oh, and depot B loses drivers to training which means they can’t cover their own workload!

If you go back to the preparations for privatisation ASLEF (RMT is basically irrelevant to drivers) proposed keeping both a national training infrastructure and national pay bargaining. 
The government of the day insisted that BR refuse, training infrastructure was binned exacerbating the existing driver shortage and that’s why we ended up with driver salaries shooting up as market forces came into play when companies starting poaching drivers off each other.

ASLEF did get into a tie-in with Virgin to set up a driver training school, Millennium Drivers, but unfortunately the general Virgin ethos of the day that everything-BR-was-wrong quickly came to the fore and Millennium got a very bad reputation for poorly trained candidates so it didn’t last long.

Everything a driver does on the train is monitored and you will be criticised for details you have no way of knowing.

Example: train speedos are graduated in 5mph increments and are allegedly accurate to within 2 mph, so you get a 2 mph allowance (at any speed – no 10%+3mph here!). The data recorders record the speed in decimals of mph. If you’re recorded running at 77.1 mph over a 75 mph speed limit for a mile or so, that’s a meeting-without-tea-or-biscuits and a threat of disciplinary action, despite the fact that all you can tell is the needle is just over 75 – and on many trains it’ll be flickering too

The old railway used to have an instruction in the Working Timetable that, in the event of late running, drivers were to use the full capabilities of their train in order to make up time, which meant using full throttle and full brake. Do that today and you will get booked for having “aggressive driving” or “having lost control” of your train.

Attitudes to safety are utterly confused. Example: if a driver has a mobile phone on flight mode in their bag where they can’t see or hear it, that’s a distraction and a disciplinary offence – but if someone is standing behind the driving cab having a screaming argument on their phone and thumping the cab wall, that’s not a distraction at all and the driver should just deal with it.

Oh, and you can sometimes be forgiven for thinking that the railway hates drivers.

Example: if a driver makes a mistake and passes a red signal, that’s a Signal Passed at Danger. That’s fair, no complaints. However, if there’s a technical fault or a signaller incorrectly changes a signal to red in front of you and you blast past it at 100 mph, that’s a Signal Passed at Red. The railway industry believes that it’s only dangerous to pass a red signal if it’s the driver’s fault, regardless of what has happened to cause that signal to go back to red.

Another example: there’s an ongoing campaign by the railway to fit monitoring CCTV in cabs. That’s not forward facing cameras or even cameras overlooking the cab as a whole; it’s cameras specifically intended to monitor driver’s faces to see if at any time in the up-to-five-hours they’re in the driving seat without a break that driver’s attention moves away from the windscreen – even checking the speedo would trigger it. Why?

How about headlights? The industry always claims that headlights are not for drivers to see with, only for people working trackside to identify an oncoming train. So, those bright lights you see on the front of trains? They’re utterly useless for seeing anything with – but they do blind oncoming drivers.
Remember “Don’t dazzle, dip your headlights?” from the TV in the 1970s? Doesn’t apply to the railway. At night, between burningly-bright LED signals and equally horrendous headlights, you’re driving in an almost permanently dazzled state.
But if anything goes wrong, well, it’s your fault for not keeping a proper lookout. The RSSB did lab tests 20+ years ago which “proved” train drivers weren’t being dazzled, so drivers who complain are just lying.

And then there’s dealing with the passengers, which as far as the companies are concerned is not part of the drivers’ role – but the passengers don’t get given the memo.

People don’t realise that the driver has access to far less information than anyone sat in the train, they expect drivers to magically answer questions and unfortunately some get very, very stroppy when we can’t.

It’s not at all unusual for a driver not to know all the stops a train will make; if they’re only working part of the trip, they only get the stops for the section they drive. They may not even be told where the train terminates!

If a driver gets off a train at a terminus, if they’re not working it back out it’s unlikely they’ll have any idea what the train is doing next because they don’t get told.
And so on. Passengers, unsurprisingly, don’t know about things like that and assume that we’re just being awkward when we say “I’m sorry, I don’t know”.
Again, it’s demoralising.

We haven’t even looked at other safety risks. In my career I’ve had suicides, I’ve had fatal accidents because people thought a train was something they could race, I’ve had fires, I’ve had medical emergencies, I’ve had more near misses with people than I can shake a stick at, I’ve killed umpteen wild animals (a pigeon exploding on your windscreen at 100 mph is utterly gross).

About the only thing you can be certain of as a train driver is that these things will happen at some time – and they always occur in the most awkward place possible. You get great support after a fatality – but you get disciplined if you’re off too long after any other incident even if it’s triggered issues from past incidents.

Some people can’t cope with the idea of that sort of stuff, but it doesn’t become real until they’re actually out driving trains and the first incident happens. I know of an incident where a driver had to be lifted out of the seat and carried out of the cab after hitting sheep because they’d physically frozen and couldn’t stand up.

Oh, and it’s a dead end job. There are no real promotion opportunities for drivers. You’re in that cab until you retire, so if it’s not perfect for you…

Train driving is a great long-term option if it’s a job you can settle into and can teach yourself to ignore all the many little things which are demoralising.

If not, and a lot of people can’t, then it’s absolutely not a good option – but the high salary means that a lot of drivers want out but are trapped by that salary; they can’t get jobs which would allow them to move on.

Because of all the above you end up with fatigued, stressed, unhappy individuals (which in itself is a recipe for high sickness levels); add on companies which won’t recruit adequate numbers of staff, so there’s always shortages, and who generally treat those staff as both juvenile delinquents and rabid imbeciles at the same time, and you also end up with an industry that is struggling to both recruit and retain active, committed staff.

There’s a rumour that something like 40% of train drivers nationally are due to retire in the next decade because of unbalanced recruitment.

The industry’s in trouble.

End of today’s Guest Blog.

Roger French

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