A common misconception. They could also give a (truthful) bad reference, potentially jeopardising the employment opportunity, and could even recover the direct costs incurred by not working your notice period - for example, if it's necessary to pay other drivers a higher overtime rate to cover for you, the additional cost of overtime compared to the normal rate would be recoverable.
Of course not all TOCs would do this but I think it's disingenuous to suggest nothing will happen if you don't honour your notice period without prior agreement.
Not a misconception, a reality (note, I did say “in practice”
).
There is far too much scaremongering on the railway about this kind of thing.
If you breach your employment contract by leaving before your notice date the TOC can certainly withhold monies owed to you: pay; accrued holiday etc. but there is
no realistic prospect of them coming after you for any other amounts.
The amounts of money at stake are far too small for any rational commercial organisation to bother incurring (likely unrecoverable) costs to try and recover.
Clauses in contracts requiring repayment of training fees are also almost certainly unenforceable, in the way they are usually drafted by TOCs. They are only put there try and scare people into remaining for a few years after getting their keys.
Even references these days are generally limited in scope to “person W worked here from date X to date Y”, and your safety record.
I would never advise anyone to leave on bad terms for the sake of it, but in the OPs case it would be madness to lose a role in a completely unrelated industry, just for the sake of honouring a notice period and forfeiting a couple of months’ salary.
