A working life: The railway controller

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First Great Western's Deborah Hawken explains how train delays, cable thefts and sheep on the line are all in a day's work

It is possible, I suppose, to have thoroughness trained into you, but Deborah Hawken strikes me as a person who was born with hers. "Obviously this is a quiet area, so you will have to switch your mobile phone to silent," she explains, as we swish upstairs into First Great Western's Swindon control centre. "And there's no fire alarm expected today," she adds, "so if it does go off, it might be a fire. In which case, the exits are here and here." I nod, and make the necessary mental preparations.

Hawken begins the tour. Pointing, around an archipelago of tidy desks, she shows me the maintenance controller who talks to drivers on the phone to solve technical problems; there's the service controller, who investigates the cause of delays; there's the crew delivery managers; there's the high-speed desk; there's the people who arrange road replacement services; there's the customer information team, which posts all the service information online and on the station display boards.

The office is staffed constantly, in shifts, so none of the computers are personalised with clutter. The mood is relaxed and cheerful.

As a senior controller, the post she has held for almost a year, Hawken is supposed to supervise everything around us. If you ever find yourself on a delayed First Great Western train ^ which could happen anywhere from London to Penzance to Hereford to Brighton ^ then it is to this building, and to Hawken's desk, that you should direct your prayers and imprecations. I suggest this is a terrifying responsibility. "Yeah," Hawken laughs, sounding not in the least terrified at all.

Yet the spread of problems that she could face each day would frighten many people off. "We'll deal with anything," she explains, "from safety-related things, to when a train breaks down, to when you've got major signalling faults, to simple things like when someone's left a wallet on a train. It's all sorts. Some days it will run reasonably smoothly, other days it's just one thing after another and you're really up against it."

All seems calm this morning, however. Nearby, some of Hawken's colleagues are making wry suggestions about how to fix a hole in the platform at Dorking. Besides this, everything appears to be running well. To keep this peace, Hawken relies on her phone and computer. Across several screens at her desk she can watch the progress of all the trains along their routes and keep an eye on the condition of the signals. The picture resembles a fearsomely detailed circuit diagram, studded with components. Each train has an identifying number ^ 1A16 and 1B94 are two that catch my eye ^ with different colours to indicate their progress. A few are red or yellow, but most are green. Which means on time, I presume? "Yes," Hawken says. "Yellow is getting later and the red is late." The final word is aspirated rather shamefully.

In this industry, however, lateness is inevitable. When Hawken began working on the railways, aged 20, as a welcome host at Newton Abbot station, she found delays as frustrating as any passenger. Later, as she gained more responsibility, becoming station manager for four years, she still sometimes could not understand why the controllers seemed almost determined to inconvenience her customers.

When she became a controller herself however, in 2001, she started to see how bewilderingly complex the picture really was ^ to anyone who could see all of it.

Delays can come from many sources, for one thing. There are the breakdowns and the "wrong kind of snow" and the other things that people grumble over, but there are also lightning strikes, suicides, sheep on the line, floods and ^ frequently these days ^ cable thefts to worry about. People steal the signal wires for the copper, Hawken explains. Or, often, they mistakenly steal fibre optic ones. A recent theft in south Wales affected, to the best of her recollection, about 30,000 people. "You need a big sign that says, 'This is NOT copper'," she smiles.

And once a delay has been caused, the ramifications can be complex, creating dilemmas that you would need a moral philosopher to solve. For instance, when Hawken was a station manager she often asked control for permission to hold a mainline train on the platform so passengers from a delayed branch-line train could still connect to it. As often as not she would be refused, and struggled to understand why. Now she realises this had probably been a sensible decision.

First, there is the obvious point that the mainline train, and those behind it, may also have passengers who will miss their connection if they are delayed. And this is far from the end of the matter. "By holding a train, you could cause all sorts of problems," Hawken explains. "Some services don't have very long at their destinations before they go back out again. You've also got train crew due to have a break, before not necessarily working back on the same service."

And if you end up with crew in the wrong place, the problems amplify. For instance, each driver can only "sign" certain routes, meaning that these are the only stretches of track they are experienced enough to drive trains on. So if the necessary drivers are not where they are needed, you cannot always guarantee that a colleague will be able to take their place. In short, sometimes the convenience of a small group of passengers must be sacrificed so that a larger group can arrive on time. "I don't think it's a decision that anyone takes lightly," Hawken says, "but we do need to look at the problems that [it] could cause."

Now aged 34, Hawken still takes the train to work and back, so she understands how what she does affects people. "I do hear passengers having a bit of a grumble," she admits. "Yes, I can understand why they get upset when they're delayed, but I don't ever take it personally because I know ^ myself and all my colleagues ^ we do work as hard as we can to provide a good service. But sometimes it's difficult, and of course the travelling public aren't ever going to realise that ^ I think you've just got to accept it really, otherwise you really would be a in a bad mood a lot of the time."

Ironically, even though Hawken and her colleagues do everything they can to reduce delays, she admits it is the days when things go wrong that she enjoys most. These are the days, after all, when she is needed most ^ and when the greatest challenges come up. "I just love the fact that I never know what I'm going to be dealing with next," she says. "That's what I enjoy about the job ^ It's when you've got a really difficult problem and you manage to get around it. Whether it's myself or one of my colleagues saying, 'Have you thought of this?'. Then we try it and it works."

Even so, challenges like these cannot be relied upon to form an orderly queue. "You can't plan for one incident to happen after you've dealt with the previous one," Hawken says. "So you can be sitting there, and you can be told that you've lost all the signalling at Didcot, and then you'll be told that you've got a train failure at Reading. Then you'll be told that a train has struck a load of sheep down on the Barnstaple line and it can't move. They'll all come within a few minutes of each other."

At such times, the control floor becomes unrecognisable from the peaceful place it is today. "It gets very noisy because everyone's on the phones," she says. "You get a few people coming in to try and help, or to try and find out exactly what's going on. So the control floor tends to be busier. It's about trying to prioritise what you deal with, who you speak to first, and try to drown out the noise so you can concentrate on what you're doing."

And what is that like? "I quite enjoy the adrenaline rush," she admits. "And when I look back I get satisfaction out of thinking that I got all those passengers on the move. We sorted that out. It went as well as it could do."

One thing that no one on the railways takes pleasure from, however, are the regular incidents of suicide that blight the track. "Only last week, I had a driver phone up to report he'd just struck someone," Hawken says, retreating momentarily from her usual cheery tone.

"It's difficult, because I've never experienced it myself, but you realise it must be an absolutely horrendous thing. This bloke had just come across someone who was lying on the track with his head on the rail." She pauses sadly for a moment.

At other times, meanwhile, the problems she faces can be positively entertaining. "A passenger on one of our trains phoned up to report some 'animal cruelty' involving a man and a goat in a field," she says, pronouncing the words in such a way as to leave me in no doubt about exactly what the man was doing. "And there have been a few times," she adds, her colleague chuckling along this time, "when we've had reports of men touching themselves on trains. It's not that unusual." I see, I say, and nod. What's the procedure there? Hawken's response is raucous laughter.