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Northern services increase/ guard courses

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LokiB

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3 Feb 2020
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Northern have announced from May 16th that their services will be increasing with passenger numbers going up etc.

Have the people currently working in the industry noticed a significant increase in numbers with lockdown restrictions easing?

Also, looking from the outside you'd think this would likely result in more staff needed therefore courses increasing but is anyone in the know if this will be the case or are there sufficient numbers of staff to cover the extra services?
 
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Michael1985

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9 Jun 2017
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57
Hi

I’m a guard working for Northern. There has been a noticeable increase in the number of passengers travelling and with more people staying in the UK for holidays this year, I think we will experience high numbers of leisure travellers, especially during the summer holidays.

In terms of staff recruitment, I know that my depot (Hull) is recruiting again, but each depot is unique in terms of how many staff they need and can be for a variety of reasons, for example, conductors going driving, anticipation of people retiring, new routes being taken on by certain depots. I guess the easiest way to say it, is that there isn’t a one size fits all method to recruitment; depots will recruit at different times for different reasons.

What I can tell you from my own experience, is that Hull has went from 45 conductors in one link, to 73 active conductors in 3 links over a 4 year period. Also, like I said before, they’ve advertised to recruit again recently and already have 5 waiting to start in a talent pool.

Just a final point to your question. Throughout the pandemic, the number of services have reduced but the number of staff haven’t, so therefore there has been a lot of staff on standby from home in case they are needed. When you talk about ‘extra services’ then they aren’t really; we are just getting back to the levels we had before COVID so the staffing is sufficient for the routes, at an educated guess anyway.
 
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