Well what can I say.

Thank you for the welcome, it was much appreciated. It was never my intention when I posted to try and change peoples minds or attitudes, so I take no offence if anyone disagrees with what I wrote, and they get no argument from me. I know that for many, the inconvenience suffered will over-ride any understanding of a situation because that is human nature. I suffer exactly the same myself. Sit in a queue of traffic for two hours, you tend to forget that the reason that you are sat there is that somebody has been severely injured in a crash, you only concentrate on the missed appointment that it's caused you. What I was truely grateful for was the obvious understanding that posters have since expressed.

I have no doubt that there will be trains running next week whatever we do. Already, we are having visits from managers who we have never seen before, and we are being told to go away while they spend an hour at our workstation under the observation of other managers. They will no doubt claim that the personel brought in to maintain the train service will be fully compliant with training legislation and will be able to provide documentation to back up this competency. However, we spend at least one month on each workstation training to be able to deal instantly with every one of the situations that can arise before we can be considered competent to work them alone, and another six months on probation after passing out. If anyone thinks back to Ladbroke Grove, the signaller there had 12 seconds from being aware that an accident may take place to possibly avert or greatly reduce the extent of the accident, and was criticised for not having done so, although the report was highly critical of the training that he had received in dealing with these situations.

None of the managers doing the training have worked in this signal box on a regular basis for at least five years. I will make no allegations, but leave it to everyone else's judgment as to whether this is suitable behaviour for a company charged with your safety.

The job itself is not difficult, and can often be quite mundain, that is until things go wrong. It's four o'clock in the morning, and everything is going smoothly when suddenly a bell rings out, then another, you start counting and get to six. You're hunting the panel to see which button has a small light illuminated above it, you've got four to choose from and just manage to catch a glimpse of it before it goes out. Within a second, you flick a switch and a signal goes back to red. You double check to make sure that no trains have passed it in the last couple of minutes, and that nothing is approaching it, even though you know in your head that there hasn't been one. Now you can relax a bit and pick up a phone and confirm that you have stopped trains. You realise just how fast your heart rate has gone up as the adrenaline pumps around your body.

It may read like a good novel, but all the best ones are based on fact. What I've just described is a scene that is very fresh in the memory. It happened this morning, and it was the first time in five years that I've ever received an emergency alarm without being first warned about it. The situation was real, and it is by good grace that no train from my direction was affected, otherwise the pressure really goes on. You have to stop that train. Sadly, the man in Cardiff was not so fortunate, because it was he that received the call from a driver to say that he had hit something in the Rumney area. It turned out to be two people, who both sadly lost their lives. The number of hours I had already worked did not affect my judgement, or my reaction times. I was 10 hours into my second shift, and after tonight, will be able to put the incident behind me for a few days. I find myself wondering if I would have been so responsive if I was six hours into my seventh shift out of ten, which is what the latest proposal that our management is suggesting we should work.

I am personally torn between the effects that this has on the public, and the effect that the proposed changes to my chosen personal lifestyle will cause. Having worked with the public for many years, including for a company not so far from your hearts, and spent a long time commuting on that same company's trains as you do, I can also sympathise with your own personal situations. Getting home from work at 2am in the morning instead of 11pm because of severe disruption is never a joke whatever the cause.

 

If I can give an insight from the other side of the fence, as one of those involved in the dispute, because there is very little information in the public domain for the public to judge if we are being unreasonable or not.

First off, this is not a union propaganda message so please don't take it that way. I am a 30 year railman who has never, in all of my service even considered taking industrial action until now.

The dispute involves between 70 and 80 signallers in the South Wales area, all of whom have one thing in common. They will be the first of many that will, within the next few years, be housed in the new "Welsh Assembly" led state of the art control centre in Cardiff. This will include all of those from North/Mid and West Wales as well, since it is the Welsh Assembly's stated aim to create Welsh Rail, where all parts of the rail network in Wales are controlled from Cardiff. The first part has already been achieved, when management of the North Wales coast route was transferred to Cardiff six months ago to join the existing South Wales control. Now they start on bringing all the signallers under the same roof, starting January 4th.

The Newport signallers are the first to be affected, with 6 being forced to transfer in January and the remaining 12 next October. I say forced, because although NR^» (Network Rail - home page) will say that four volunteered to transfer, it was made quite clear that if no "volunteers" came forward, six would be chosen, and if they refused to go, they would be making themselves redundant. As it is, two have been forced to transfer against their wishes to the new location.

The staff in all of the larger South Wales signal boxes, together with the Vale of Glamorgan, have worked 12 hour shifts without difficulty for a number of years. In the case of Newport, they were introduced at the company's request 12 years ago. The majority of the staff working in Newport have joined the team since that time, on the understanding of the shift pattern. Many, like myself, have actively chosen the shift pattern after many years of working 8 hour shifts in various jobs. The average age of the staff in Newport is about 40. The majority of us have done jobs in the outside world, and know what it is like. Many have children, and the shift pattern lends itself to allowing a better family life, easier child care arrangements, less travelling, all things that this Government has been actively promoting over the past years.

All that the staff who are immediately affected by this impending move have ever asked, is that the upheaval of moving working locations is kept to a minimum. NR promised in fact, to ensure that this was the case when the move was first discussed. It is bad enough for the staff in Newport that they have to travel to probably the most difficult part of Cardiff to access from that direction. On match days and special events, access will be doubly difficult, and travelling time will often be extended. What NR is now demanding is that we also work on an additional 80 days a year, with all the costs and problems that it brings. This will have a devastating affect for many on ourselves and our families. More importantly, if NR are allowed to do it this time, they will have a precedent for all future openings and for removing the 12 hour facility from all other areas. This is why many of my colleagues nationally are watching events with equal interest and concern. The decision was made not to involve them in the ballot at this stage because it does not directly involve them. We chose to limit the effect to the immediate area so as to interupt the lives of as few as possible while proving our point. We apologise in advance to those who are affected.

It is not only the extra costs for travel amd loss of free time that this is about, it's about extra childcare costs, other family members having to change their working arrangements to fit in. At present, several wives of signallers work part time so that they can work when their husbands are off work. What effect does that have when the main bread winner is in work for two or three days a week extra, often at antisocial hours. From the outset of negotiations, which started seven months ago, NR have catagorically refused to budge on the issue of 8 hour shifts. They claim it is to save costs. At first it was ^1600 a man less per year, (although this disregards the additional costs paid under redundancy arrangements for travel because they are being paid by somebody else). Safety issues were never even mentioned. They even accepted that in terms of fatigue, the choice of 8 hours versus 12 hours was fatigue neutral. The latest figure quoted is ^136000 total additional cost, although where that comes from who knows. We've also been told that if we have 12 hour shifts, six others will have to lose their jobs, which is tantamount to blackmail.

We have tried to come to a compromise. We have even offered to allow spare capacity in Newport (which is built into the 12 hour roster that NR agreed with the remaining staff only two weeks ago) to travel to Cardiff to cover the one shift every 12 weeks that, under their table of organisation, makes any attempt to create a roster which is complaint with agreed principals impossible. At every turn, we have been rebuffed, deceived, and told outright lies. The strike action is the result of 7 months of outright frustration on the part of the staff . It could end tomorrow with one simple acknowledgement that we are entitled to retain what we already have. We're not asking for extra money, or less hours, or better conditions. Just to be able to keep what we already have.

The staff who do the job have all accepted, when they joined the grades, that there are certain limitations on their social lives, which the job requires. This job does not just affect our lives for the 8 or 12 hours that we are in work like so many. We have to modify our social lives well before we actually start work. For example, few realise that to be safe, we are advised not to drink alcohol within 12 hours of starting work. Reporting for duty with any amount greater than the natually occuring level of alcohol in the bloodstream is a dismissable offence and we are subject to random screening. You can quite happily drive to work, get stopped and pass a breathaliser test with flying colours, and still be found under the influence at work and sacked, three hours after you've started work. This is not so bad if you have three days off between shifts, but imagine if this is your one day off in thirteen days. How many others would accept the imposition of that sort of limitation?

That is why more and more signallers have chosen the 12 hour shift pattern, and the majority of those who cannot swap view us with a degree of envy. Almost all signallers who are on 8 hour shifts will tell you that in order to obtain any sort of quality time off (we are talking four consecutive days including a Sunday), they have to work strings of seven or eight consecutive shifts, often followed by one day off and another string of five or six days. I would ask what is safer, to work a maximum of four 12 hour night shifts, followed by three days off (as we currently do), or a run of seven late shifts, with a days off and seven nights with no guarantee that you won't be asked to work on your day off as well. The maximum number of shifts that a signaller can work in 13 x 8  hour shifts in a row before a day off and many have been asked to do that in the past, because of a policy of always maintaining vacancies for budgetary purposes.

The matter of the RAIB^▸ (Rail Accident Investigation Branch) report into the Westbury derailment was also raised. This has been jumped on by NR as a nice little deflection towards the safety aspect, even though the report actually said that fatigue COULD have played a part. (No absollute certainty there). If you read the report in full, it raises a few key issues. The member of staff concerned had a roster which saw him working six consecutive shifts. This was his sixth. In the past five, he had finished at midnight, 6am, midnight, 6am and midnight. It is no wonder that his body clock was all to hell with a pattern like that. The background of it was that it was decided that one man was all that was needed to operated the 80, or so miles of route that Westbury covered, after midnight, and so one of the night shifts was withdrawn in order to cut a post and save money. All well and good, and given the traffic which tends to be reasonably light early morning, they are correct. That is until something goes wrong and the workload rockets, mainly due to the number of phonecalls that you will recieve, often totally unnecessary. If you also look at the comparison between his base roster and his actual hours, you will find that in the previous month he had worked six addtional shifts, all because Westbury carried two vacancies. As already said, it is an NR policy to keep vacancies, because it is cheaper to pay overtime than incur pension and national insurance payments of another on the headcount. This has been going on for years.

Sorry for the long, and first post. If it allows a few of our customers to have a more informed discussion on the subject, then I will feel it's been worth it at least.

And let us hope, that we're all in work next Monday because none of us want to strike but it is our last hope and resort to keep what we have fought long and hard for.