Andy Long, Driver Competence Specialist, Great Western Railway
I started in 1993. I was unemployed during a recession and applying for any jobs I saw. I saw one at Canton Depot, basically a messenger job, taking messages around the offices. I got this job, which was temporary for six months. While I was there, I got another one as a guard, and that was it; I was on my way.
If you can be a guard on the Cardiff Valley, you can be a guard anywhere in the world. It was challenging, but I thought, ‘I’ll get through it one of these days.’ And I did.
I became a driver with ATW in 1998, again on the Valleys, and then moved to the main line a couple of years later. From there, in 2008, I went into driver training, then resource management, before I moved from Arriva Trains Wales to GWR as a driver trainer again. This was before working with them on their simulator. I took on my current role in 2019.
I think the biggest worry is TPWS. New rolling stock, such as the Class 800s, have phenomenal brakes. That’s great, but you can come to rely on it, and brake later than with an HST, for example. We try to train that out, to make sure people brake in the same place and get the speed down. But there can be a tendency to brake later; the thing is, the TPWS still kicks in as it does for older stock. This gives us more activations than we’d like.
To help this, and to instil good safety strategies, we encourage people to use risk-triggered commentary at GWR. We have a four-stage approach to that: the first is ‘I observe the risk’; the second is ‘I verbalise the risk’; the third is ‘I do something about it and check it’; and the fourth is ‘I reverbalise to remind myself about the risk I’m handling’. It’s about encouraging drivers to take a proactive approach to safety.
We also advocate thinking ahead in small stages. So, if you’re on a Cardiff to Paddington train at Newport, think of Bristol Parkway, not Swindon, which would be the station before.
It’s about more than remembering a day. It’s important that we value the full experience of the people who work for us, and the people who have been working on the railway for a long time. We’ve learned a lot from past incidents – especially Southall (1997) and Ladbroke Grove (1999). They’re used a lot in our training. The articles in this magazine are important as they keep these lessons alive. But so is talking to people like me before we retire.