Have you driven 195s or 331s on Northern routes at different times of the day? Some of what you've experienced will apply to Northern, some of what you've experienced won't. As you'll notice
@ANorthernGuard gives a valid reason for one member of staff being in the front unit and another being in the rear unit, on another forum a vocal GWR driver claims it's a Northern only rule and the Northern rules regarding guards are a load of nonsense. (He's anti-DOO but of the opinion guards would provide a more visible staff presence if they weren't following 'nonsense rules'.)
I dont necessarily know if its for a Driver at one TOC to question the rules set by the standards department at another TOC . The standards say you cannot unit hop and there should be good reason behind that and the standard should have been set using an evidence based process . Of course as the rule is not a reflection of any RSSB requirement contained in the rule book that standard could be revisited should the toc wish . And at some point it may well find itself subject to discussion and possible review .
Strictly from a personal point of view even if unit hopping was permitted it would be something I would be reluctant to do . Because whilst I am in the front unit with no gangway connection I do not have easy access to my PPE such as my handlamp , my red flag , my hi viz vest and any other equipment I am carrying which could assist me . So if I have unit hopped between station X and Y but something happens and the train is involved in an out of course situation before reaching station Y I wont be able to go on to the line to assist the driver or return to my rear unit and rear cab to get an item from my bag .
Yes guards if permitted to unit hop could provide a presence to more customers , and majority of the time could do so without issue . But we have set safety management systems in place for all scenarios that could occur . Personally I would rather be in the rear unit at best a few carriages away from my PPE so if there is a need to go on the line to assist the driver I can do .
Guards being permitted to unit hop could also result in incidents which currently cause minor delay to become incidents with more substantial delays . For example if I am in the front unit without my viz vest and someone pulls a passcom in the rear unit it is the driver who will have to go and reset that .
The question is really when it's safe to self dispatch and when should there be a dispatcher. Even where there's agreements in place they only seem to be 'gentleman's agreements' and are ambiguous - take the ASLEF/Gatwick Express agreement which was for 10 cars maximum DOO - nothing about the length of the cars or the number of doors on the cars.
Risk assessments are used to decide when dispatchers are and are not required (notwithstanding local instructions like stations with RA dispatch ). All locations will have risk assessments carried out and then provision set according to the findings of the risk assessment .
Those risk assessments should be and I do believe are being revisited so we might see changes to provision at some locations as a result of revisiting the risk assessments .
Do we know for a fact that the technical detail or the risk assessment for the Gatwick express DOO agreement did not specify some technical details about length of actual train . That should surely be considered as part of any risk assessment .
I'd have thought a computer would be able to do diagramming much more accurately than a human - unless, of course, the system was rubbish!
The computer might be able to produce more efficient diagrams , and to a point it does . But an experienced human is also able to spot things that wont work in practice despite meeting the parameters the computer program is following . Of course again the computer could be programmed for this , but that requires that experience to be present in the people using the program
Any experienced guard or driver will be able to look at their diagram for the day and highlight the areas with performance risks .E.g. you work a train that passes through a major city with a number of constantly congested junctions and then you have a break that meets the minimum requirements , you can say with some degree of confidence that the train following your break will have to be taken out late . This is why for all the computer systems used human checking at multiple levels should still be part of the diagramming process . Unfortunately the drive to be a business is reducing provision for this . But then we have local managers at least in my experience increasingly asking the actual train crew themselves for feedback on the diagrams and the diagrams with performance risks in them as a reactive step to found poor performance when the diagrams see the real world .
