Last night my train was ten minutes late and the T.Op I was relieving was not happy. When she got to WER she was told that the train she was on had to go into the depot for maintenance and that she should change over with the next one in. That was late for a start and then rather than getting her moving Wood Lane decided to stable the train she’d come in on. At that time of night the timetable runs HAI – EPP – HAI – EPP but she was so late leaving WER that by the time she reached NOA the HAI train that should have been five minutes behind her had already gone through. Consequently there hadn’t been an EPP train for around 20 minutes at a time when most people are heading home from a night out up West and even at LES the platform was crowded, God knows what it must have been like between MAA and HOL.
Despite all that I only had one person, self waking for a change, who asked me if there were any trains going beyond LOU; another bit of business for the minicab office. As I was walking into the sidings this morning I was surprised to see the Night Spare hailing me from the cab of one of the trains; apparently one of the LOU early turns had blown out so he’d been sent in a taxi from LES to drive it up to EPP and then run it back to LES where an early spare would take him off.
And they say we’ve got too many Train Ops!
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