Would I be mad to leave S&T maintenance?

[Mc89]

I've been a technician on the east coast main line for a little while now within S&T faulting and maintenance. I'd hoped to retire at Network Rail but the modernising maintenance initiative has really sucked a lot of the joy out of the job with a reduction to 2 person teams and a new shift pattern that seems to encompass all the bad elements of previous rosters while doing away with much of the benefits of shift work.

I still love parts of the job like interesting faults and when you get chance to actually fix something but the negatives are beginning to outweigh the positives. It seems like the glaringly obvious issue is there's just not enough staff and not enough access to the infrastructure to do a good job. I sat at the side of the track for 9 hours the other night and managed a total of 18 minutes access.

I've worked really hard to be good at this job and have the opportunity in all likelihood to become a team leader in the very near future but i'm just not excited about that prospect anymore.

Has anyone recently moved away from the railway to another industry and do you think you made the right choice? did your skills transfer somewhat seamlessly or was there a steep learning curve? The thing i'm struggling with is that the railway infrastructure is pretty specialist and niche so am I just kidding myself thinking id be useful somewhere else?

 

[alxndr]

I'm not a fan of modernising maintenance, and there's less of the fun parts of the job than when I first started and got to chase "proper" faults around relay rooms, but I can't think of anywhere else I'd rather be either. I really can sympathise and often wish I'd started a bit later on so I didn't know how much better it could be. I hate dayshifts and prefer doing things midweek when it's quieter so the shifts don't bother me, but big thing for me as a teamleader since modernising maintenance is the two person teams. Often it's just myself and an operative with limited skills or an apprentice, which can pile the pressure on at times as there's no one to bounce ideas off and less chance of someone piping up and saying that they remember seeing something like this once before 20 years ago when the average service length in my team is just 5 years!

I wouldn't jump ship just yet though. Access is getting increasingly difficult, but I've also seen the difference between good planning and bad planning. At one point we were endlessly struggling for access as bad planning management meant that we were never booked into T3s and always jumping in and out between trains on the diversion routes, a year later we had a far better manager and were booked into possessions without fail. Suddenly we went from having next to no track access to a decent amount. Modernising maintenance is still new and things might improve as it settles down (or the penny finally drops and they realise it was a bad idea).

That said, I am using the increased downtime these days to help get time to do a part-time Open University engineering degree. It's mainly for my own satisfaction, partly incase I finally get completely sick of being on the tools and want to boost my chances of climbing the ladder in the direction of S&TME or similar, and partly as an insurance policy in case it makes another turn for the worse.

Historically people didn't really tend to leave the railway unless they were pushed out or retired, so you might not find many experiences of people going elsewhere. I only know of one person who's left S&T and they went to work in a railway related job elsewhere, possibly something to do with Atkins technical investigations but I'm not certain. I would imagine a lot of the skills are transferrable, especially the non-technical ones but also some of the technical ones.