Is there a railway turntable on the East London Line? Someone told me there is, but I can’t find any reference to it anywhere.
The only "turntable" would be in the Maintenance shed at NXG depot, small one just for a single bogie to be taken out of the shed. There isn't even a semblance of one anywhere else on the route.
Do you book on at the depot itself and get walking time, or is there remote booking on/off?
No remote booking on in normal circumstances. There is a "severe weather" stipulation we have, you can call up from NXG station to book on if there's inclement weather. (Have to walk up to depot). Once you book on, there's walking time in diagrams back to NXG Station, to Silwood Sidings or cab from outside depot to Clapham Junction. There is a 10 minute booking off allowance. There is also a 20 minute overtime allowance if you need to return to depot to hand in a report/RT3185.
As others have said, night work is on the Night Link only, unless you're doing RDW. Everyone else still works late shifts, just not in passenger service between 0100-0500.
People say the route is intense, but if you look at it with a certain frame of mind, it is what it is. I'd rather be doing this route, than running on greens at 125mph for 40 minutes, I think I would find that more boring!
We're well looked after in terms of if our train is faulty. Control want us out of the way as quickly as possible and Bombardier do most of the work for us. If there is a problem, 80% of the time we'll detrain and run ECS back to depot. It is rare for us as drivers to have to isolate anything or carry out fault finding whilst out and about.
Once you take in to account being able to handle extreme changes in gradients on the core route and acknowledging the fact that you will be running on restrictives with a more conservative drive style set by the company, we actually have it pretty good at NXG depot compared to other TOCs.