Traincrew Shortage Poach-A-Thon?

Tractor2018 said:

More than 20% on reference salary is "a very small increase"? Wow. And RDW about 60% more.

Got no idea what you mean about poorer conditions either.

Railway fact checker required I think.

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My thoughts exactly!! Scotraildriver is talking gash.

toot toot said:

My thoughts exactly!! Scotraildriver is talking gash.

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To be fair it is a good hike in salary from what we are on at ScotRail but I suspect the reference to "poorer" conditions is mainly the fact TPE, nor indeed any other TOC have what we have in ScotRail - a protected sliding scale for driver's removed from the grade due to medical or safety of the line incidents. This ensures you don't suddenly drop from 50k to say 26k as a TE if you get removed from driving. It reduces your salary over 3 years and the base level is currently just under 38k. Something Abellio would love to get off us, but we'd be mad to sell it in any future negotiations.

Surreytraveller said:

Yes. They want to employ inexperienced staff that can be brainwashed. Experience and knowledge seems to be frowned upon these days.
Unfortunately, in my experience, it is these newer brainwashed staff that seem to be the most militant and unwilling to be useful

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It is recognised that there is a shortage of train drivers in the industry at the moment. The large number of trainees is partly due to (in the North anyway) a Rail North Partnership initiative to support TOCs with training more drivers.
Obviously, if you recruit a qualified driver, they’re productive much quicker than a trainee, but then a TOC somewhere else has to recruit and potentially train another driver

The RNP initiative encourages TOCs to train new unqualified drivers (with a small financial benefit from the government to offset the unproductive period) as this is the most effective means of getting fresh blood into the industry and alleviating the shortage. The alternative is that TOCs train the bare minimum and some TOCs (I.e. Northern) are left to restarting the training cycle.