orpine.
To me you come across as quite adversarial and you also seem to be quite jealous of what drivers get paid. I don't know what you do in your job, but a driver certainly has to earn it.
If I were to offer you a train at Waterloo one autumn evening, with 12 (fully laden + standing) coaches (so approx 1000 people), it's at night, the leaves are coming down in their droves and you have thick freezing fog, your first call is Winchester, in just about 52-55' to do it and you have to achieve the full line speed of 100 mph in places to do that, would you?
I'm not telling you what the speeds are, where they are, nor I am telling you where the crossovers, stations are nor the platform lengths, you can't see the signals either because of the thick freezing fog and it's super slippery too because of those lovely falling leaves. Wanna do it?
If I set that challenge to office bods, they baulk at the very thought of it and run a mile, yet I have to do it, it's part of the job description, to be able to work a train like that is no problem to me whatsoever. Don't give it a second thought.
Just remember we don't have sat nav or anything like it in the cab, we do it all from memory and I hold an awful lot of my network, with all of the above in my head all of the time I'm out there in those conditions.
It's all grand when the sun is out, the sky is blue and you have nice dry clean rails to run on, but even then you still have to be on your guard, just in case a nice diesel train has dropped oil or there's been a shower during a prolonged dry period, which can make things just that tad slippery when you least expect it.
Then there's the time when the train gets a defect & I have to deal with it, OK nowadays we have GSM-R to ring the problem through, get advice (if we need it) and do what control says, not up to us anymore it seems. I'm the one who has to follow the instructions to the letter, what about a train fire that may require an emergency evacuation? I'm the one who has to get the emergency switch off of the traction current, summon the emergency services and liaise with the signaller very quickly!
We also have to do annual or bi-annual assessments to prove what we do & don't know (forgotten) in the rules, get the updates as well & do a full rules exam when required too. Fail it, you're back to school or out!
I've worked my way up from the bottom to where I am now, do I enjoy it? Not particularly, it doesn't give me any challenges whatsoever, it's boring, mundane, repetitive, unless of course it goes kaput, when it becomes slightly more interesting. The only thing that keeps me here is the travel perks (free & EU reduced rate, Priv Oyster cards) & the money to pay my bills, other than that, there's nothing really to keep me on the railway.
But being one of the old skool, I can quite easily say Veni, vidi, vici. I came, I saw & I conquered every challenge so far. Nothing much fazes me now and do I think I'm fairly paid? Not really when you consider the responsibility that I hold day in day out. I think I should be on around the £50k mark, not £43k.
However the flipside of this is, I'm on a true 4 day week, so the maximum number of days I work out of 7 is 4, the drawback to that is we get some really nasty long turns to make up for the amount of time off. Plus some of the longest ones are at 0400 in the morning, so that means getting up at 0250-0300 then doing a 9-9½ hr turn. Still wanna complain?
Oh and don't forget that Xmas day & Boxing day will come out of your leave entitlements too! Good isn't it? NOT!
No one in fact it's just usually how there things go, admittedly not on this forum..!
Blimey
casting a judgement when you know little about something isn't however.
