Second day back and I was spare, everyone showed up, nothing went wrong, I cleaned Clive’s tank. Something I should have mentioned ages ago are the changes to the lower management structure that took place last year.

Before we had DMTs, Duty Manager Trains, who filled the space between us and the head honcho of each depot, the Train Operations manager or TOM. The DMTs rotated between working the desk, handling any incidents or unusual occurrences (the “blue light”) and dealing with personnel stuff like licences, attendance, sickness and disciplinary matters. If the TOM was away they would nominate one of the DMTs to stand in.

All that has changed, we now have TOSMs, Train Operations Standards Managers, basically deputy TOMs, who handle the personnel issues. The “blue light” has been replaced by DRMs, Duty Reliability Managers who aren’t attached to the depot any more and I believe cover not only the Central but parts of other lines too. Those left working the desk are now DTSMs, Duty Train Staff Managers.

In typical LUL fashion the selection process has thrown up some bizarre anomalies, like a DMT at another depot who had covered their TOM for months ended up as a DTSM while another who’s only experience of a disciplinary interview was taking notes is now a TOSM. Various DMTs have left for other depots while others have moved in. As both TOSMs and DRMs get paid more there are a lot of unhappy DTSMs who think they have been overlooked.

This specialising of roles has not gone without a few hiccups, I was told there was one occasion where an incident over on the west end of the line left all the DRMs stuck east of it and the nearest DTSM couldn’t attend as it was no longer part of their job description whereas in the old days any DMT could have gone and sorted it out.

Another change was that while there used to be a TOM at each of the five depots there are now three with the one at WHC also in charge of WER while the one at HAI is responsible for LOU. Both LOU and WER have lost their admin people so if you need to sort something out who have to get in touch with HAI and WHC respectively. At WHC the admin are so busy that apparently you have to book an appointment to see them through the DTSM. Much grumbling at the “banjo playing” depots.