Rail journalist and South West Trains passenger Alan Williams meets the train drivers who get you out and home again safely every day, whatever the weather or time of year
How many of us, as we board our train, give even a thought as to who is “up front” doing the driving? Yet, he—or, increasingly, she—is responsible for your absolute safety as you and everybody else travel across the network at speeds that can reach 100mph. At peak periods, your driver is in control of up to 500 tons of train, with some 1,000 passengers on board, and with 3,000hp at their fingertips. So the job is every bit as responsible as that of a jumbo jet pilot.
But, I hear you say, driving a train must be easy—surely you don’t even have to steer it? Actually, nothing could be further from the truth, as I discovered when I joined Alan Nichols, one of South West Trains’ 1,140 drivers, for the day at Woking.
“It takes 30 weeks of pretty intensive training before you can take the three-day test to become a qualified driver,” explains Alan. And that, as Winston Churchill famously said, is just the end of the beginning. Even when you get your driver’s licence permitting you to take charge of a train on your own, you must then begin the long task of “learning the road”. As Alan explains: “This requires learning the location and meaning of every signal on every part of the line, every speed limit, gradient and curve that might affect the running of your train, not to mention the length of the platforms at each station, almost all of which vary.”
To give you an idea of what that entails, on a single short journey from Waterloo to Woking, your driver will have to know the location of, observe and, if necessary, react to more than 50 separate signals, comply with a minimum of 10 changes in the maximum permitted speed along the way, and bring your train to a stand safely at the correct spot at more than a dozen very different stations.
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