A slight amendment to my last post regarding the pay deal, ASLEF (and I believe the other unions) formally rejected the current offer at the start of August. On 18 August LUL wrote to the unions asking them “to recommend this to their members and allow them a referendum”. Unite (not Unison) have said they will ballot but don't appear to have said whether or not that they will recommended it, another unamed union did respond, presumably in the negative, while the other two didn’t even bother replying.

LUL have now written again and proposed that we go to ACAS to sort it out which is odd seeing that the Unions are still happy to negotiate but then they don’t have the proposed expanded service for the Olympics to worry about.

Speaking of which while Wood Lane used to announce that we were running a “good service” at regular intervals recently they have taken to highlighting the cancellations due to “ONA” – operator non availability. I’ve been checking the booking-on sheets and I can confirm that all depots have uncovered duties; we are short staffed everywhere though mine appears to be the worst afflicted. With no great influx of TOps expected it is going to be very interesting to see what they come up with.

Strange things were going on at THB on Saturday. It started off with a phantom “held visual” on the WB, a little light that comes on in the cab to tell us to wait. We get these all the time but later it developed into a “next station closed” message when DEB was anything but and finally imposed a 15kph speed restriction on the sections into and out of the EB platform adding 6 minutes to our journey time. Perhaps the rabbits up there have been nibbling on the cables.....