Monday, 10 February 2014


Just a quick note to confirm that I did work during the strike and spent my time doing LES - EPP shuttles which got very monotonous very quickly.  We were rewarded by the sight of our dark overlord and master, the LES Train Operations Manager, doing platform duties.  Next time we are going to dress him in a black tail coat and top hat…

Thursday was my last day at work until next week, I’m on annual leave until Sunday or hopefully Monday if the Mafia are kind enough to give me Sunday off but for the present I am simply just another passenger, which is what I was before I joined the Tube and always will be.  I’ve been spending a lot of time travelling to and from Romford where Old Mother Shrugged is in hospital and when I went through NEP on Saturday morning there was a long queue at the lone ticket machine with no member of staff anywhere to be seen.

NEP is one of our reversing points and obviously the focus is on maintaining the service, if you’ve only got one member of staff available with the choice of tipping out trains or helping with tickets then the trains are going to get priority.  And you can’t monitor the whole station from the ticket hall if the CCTV screens are in the station supervisor’s office.

Did I mention how glad I was not to be on stations anymore?

6 comments:

  1. My sincere best wishes to you and your mother. Take care ASLEF shrugged.

    Re: the shuttling - I imagine it's deathly dull, but at least it's pretty and no pipes! Imagine doing the HOL - HAI via NEP. Still, at least you'd get to go up the siding, which I imagine'd be a nice change the first few times you did it...

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  2. " And you can’t monitor the whole station from the ticket hall if the CCTV screens are in the station supervisor’s office."

    Which is kind of why I'm worried about the plan shown on London Reconnections for Metro & local stations... I've heard the bosses going on about CCTV being a great thing that improves safety, but if there's no-one watching it...

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    1. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a train stay in the platform for too long, seen a customer do something untoward or some other situation by keeping on eye on the CCTV in my office. I'm then on my way to the platform before anyone needs to call me. On the flipside when I'm on the gateline, I can see the gateline and that's it. Customers could be doing anything on the platform and I wouldn't have a clue until someone either came to find me or someone phones the station. I'm also fully expecting to have my new I-pad snatched off me by someone that legs it off down the street safe in the knowledge that I can't leave the station to chase them.

      It's a brave new World



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  3. Here's another one. Whether you think the "action short of a strike" has any point, some station staff are opening the UTS gates at locations for the periods ordered by the RMT. These are then being closed remotely by a member of the Prestige PFI contractor on the instruction of senior LU management once they have seen this occur on CCTV. Question is: Is it safe to close gate arrays remotely when you have no clear sightline of the barriers? What if a child, elderly person, mobility/visually-impaired person, pregnant woman etc is passing through and the gates suddenly close on them? All the more so in Zone 1 which tend to retain the air-operated pneumatic gates which shut much quicker and harder than the later electric version. Indeed are UTS gates even allowed to be closed remotely in Traffic Hours and without using the local SCU? What does Safety Case say about this practice? At the moment LU management seem to regard this as just an amusing game of 'cat & mouse'.

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    1. I've never heard of remote operation of UTS gates by Prestige, as far as I was aware they could only be operated from the SCU or the station control room but if it is possible then it certainly is a safety issue with children, elderly, MIPs etc getting stuck in them. That being said I once saw a small child run away from his mother into a gate that someone else had opened and it shut around his neck, it was soooooo hard not to giggle.

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  4. Lol I've seen kids run away from their parents into open gates plenty of times OUCH.
    But yeah the gates are being closed remotely as Anonymous said above, don't think its a 'safe' thing but LU management and safety is a whole other topic...

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