this is your regular reminder to never work on the railway

never mind that, track's held in place by e1809s!

dans med oss 🎶

right dave, we've got a site visit for you. nah, not milton keynes, low earth orbit, I'll send you the details

I can foresee some problems with maintenance too

honestly at this point the funniest thing is that I am notionally pway but I've not actually done any pway on NRMI. It's all either different shades of civils, or being a glorified porter

I honestly only notice your avi and display name when they change, otherwise I get used to it pretty quickly

but yeah, ten keys, gives me plenty of spares to distribute at work and earn my way into the good graces of colleagues, railway keys are usually jealously guarded!

Railway keys are a massive rabbit hole and I'm pretty reluctant to discuss any other specific keys in detail because some of them do open critical things and are even easier (if not necessarily cheaper) to get hold of

I can either pay £10 to get it through HOPS, they'll ask my boss whether I need it and it'd be a massive faff, or I can spend roughly the same and end up with 10 which the factory overproduced and sold on the domestic market, presumably not expecting exactly this to happen.

yeah i bet you have

bradford

I genuinely don't understand how someone can walk past something that's very obviously on fire and decide it's not their problem, took no more than fifteen minutes of our time and preserving the shelter is very obviously in our interest (and theirs!) too

we waited until the firefighters arrived, showed them where the fire was, then buggered off. We were on the last train of the night, if neither of us had been there, entirely possible no-one would have reported it!

The public think we have it good, and the "real" rail staff don't think of us at all!

TOC staff live in something of an alternate reality, for many of them, their conception of the "railway family" and "rail staff" begins and ends at those directly employed by train operating companies. For us, there's little solidarity, and little recognition of the fact we even work on the railway.

I have to pay full price to ride over the same tracks where I was freezing my arse off with a surveyor and a COSS the night before. Some guards are friendlier, some treat me the same as any other passenger, a rare few treat me worse.

bah humbug!