A bloody awful night and a bloody awful train on which neither end liked the rain so I ended up driving Coded on all the open sections. We received a memo last week telling us that we’re going to have a new timetable in June next year with more trains running in the peaks, in the evenings and at weekends along with a later Saturday service and a Sunday service on the W&C. As long as they send us more TOps, most of those who were sent to the Central Line for the Olympics have already left for the Northern.

There is one disturbing little line in the memo which states that there will be “No detrainment on 'siding reversing' trains”. Now I’m not 100% sure what that means but I suspect it infers that rather than us or a member of station staff physically checking that the train is empty and using the porter buttons to close up when we reverse at DEB, NOP, WOO and NOR we will be expected to close up from the cab. At the moment if a member of staff is not available it causes a delay while we close up all 8 cars on our own and then walk back to the front end so obviously dispensing with the need for station staff will save money and delays.

Some of you may recall the hoo-ha caused by OSN 101 back in March and the rule change that allows us to carry passengers over shunt signals, maybe this is what LUL may have had in mind all along. The obvious worry is that we close up, go into the sidings then discover that we’re not alone, that we've inadvertently taken Mad Derek with us and he’s less than pleased to wake up to find himself trapped on a train. Now I’m a bit of a lump and can handle the occasional psycho (growing up in Dagenham helps) but a lot of TOps are smaller than me and an increasing number are women who might find the idea of being alone on a train with a possibly aggressive member of the public somewhat alarming.

If management think that either of the Unions are going to agree to this they must be mental, this stinks of a safety issue and whichever retard tried to stick this line in hoping that no one would notice deserves firing out of a cannon in the general direction of the Thames. All this does is reinforce the impression that LUL don’t give a rat arse about its employees’ safety, making a mockery of all the thanks and praise we’ve received from Boris downwards for our performance over the Olympics. If they’re trying to win our hearts and minds then they’re still failing miserably.