Thursday 8 March 2012

Bruce Wayne is Batman.

Not a great start to the week; on Monday I booked on to find that the Line had been shut down and my first train was running 20 minutes late due to a “suspect package” at BAN. Someone left a bag behind, someone else pulled down the handle and everything came to a complete standstill while we waited for the Police to confirm that it was not going to go boom. We’re going to get a lot more of this between now and the end of August. I was further delayed while trains were reversed at WOO in an attempt to get some of them back on timetable and ended up squeezing in a bare minimum half hour break between trains.

Tuesday I was spare but because of the number of uncovered shifts I ended up doing exactly the same shift as I did Monday and surprise, surprise my train was running 20 minutes late again. I was informed by the DTSM that a TOp had asked for a PNR at WHC, left their train on Plat 1, there was a defective train in the middle road and so the WB service at a standstill again. For some reason when the TOp returned they didn’t jump back on the train; I can only assume that they were under the impression that a spare had taken their train WB and that the train sitting there was waiting for someone else. After that was sorted out more defective trains added to the delays but this time I was turned early at NOA rather than going through to EAB so at least I didn’t have to rush my meal relief.

Thankfully Wednesday was featureless apart from one of my colleagues asking if I was ASLEF shrugged; obviously I am and I’m glad you like the blog. I'm going to spend the day hiding in the Batcave now that it appears that my secret identity is no longer secret.

2 comments:

  1. Do you know if there are any plans to have more people available who can determine whether any suspect package is actually something innocuous or not? Obviously these things need to be checked, but if it takes 10 minutes to get someone there who can do the checking that's going to be better that waiting 30 minutes before finding someone's left their gym kit on the train?

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  2. Are you volunteering?

    We already have a police-recommended procedure to deal with bags left on train which is why you don’t hear about the vast majority which are just lost property. It’s only when they fall outside that category you get service suspensions.

    If we stopped for every bag left on a train we’d never move at all.

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