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So I can get the kettle on and put my feet up waiting for it to get sorted? You don’t have to sell it to me any harder!

That sounds like an absolute dream, trains and boats in one job. And no pesky cars.

“No, I’m NOT going into your goods loop. It’s NOT FAIR. I don’t even love you anyway”

You spent 11 years doing an absolutely safety-critical role in which communication played a vital role. You were trained to calmly deal with problematic situations in accordance with your judgment and a set of rules. Exactly like signalling. Cracking bit of experience there. To be honest I...

This is a really good summary barring the management aspects which obviously vary between locations. A great description of the job which tallies almost perfectly with my experience of grade 3 single-manned boxes.

I’m a grade 3 signaller in several grade 3 boxes. Most days and nights are pretty chill when everything is going well, after I’d been in job for 6 months or so I started to lose the constant low-level anxiety that something might go wrong and you do develop a muscle memory for the job. It’s a...

Leicester is now controlled from the East Midlands Control Centre at Derby. I’m not sure what grade the panel is but maybe a grade 7? There are MOM jobs based in Leicester but they are dead man’s shoes really and I’ve only known them filled internally (albeit I’ve only been with the company 5...

All the boxes down there are Grade 3 at the moment.

As far as bell codes go I would only bother with the ones on the list below if I were you - I tried but didn’t manage to get them down pat before I went on IST and it wasn’t a big deal, but it’s one less thing to load your brain up with whilst you are there if you can learn them. These are...

I was and am not a huge note taker but I definitely needed to take a lot of notes on IST to make the subjects click in my head. You might not have to take notes if you really don’t want to and you grasp the concepts well from the lessons. You do have the rule books and the simulator after all...

You will get drug and alcohol tested at your medical, and randomly from there on out. Also if you have any safety incidents it will usually mean a ‘for cause’ D&A test. I try and leave a clear 24 hours free of booze before a shift - it is absolutely not worth losing your job because you...

It was a while ago when I applied but I think you have to email someone at Network Rail first from a work computer before you can do anything. Unfortunately you can’t just apply from home off your own back is my recollection. Maybe ask if you can borrow a work laptop during a lunch break from...

TLDR - plan to earn the basic grade 2 salary until you get signed off for your first box Your base salary is all shifts from 0001 on Monday to 2359 on Saturday, only Sundays, Bank Holidays, nights and Rest Days are usually paid extra. You may get paid a couple of hours of Sunday rate on IST if...

As a start you can try taking a photo of the bit of kit and sending it to ChatGPT with some context. “Here is a photo of a piece of equipment in the four-foot of the up line at Chudleigh Snotterton railway station, can you tell me what it is please?”. I’m surprised at how good it is sometimes...

We got the auto refresh feature activated through our LOM a few years back - such a tiny thing but it makes such a difference. Perhaps ask if he or she can get it activated for your box’s TRUST logon? Some residents actively requested not to have it in their boxes which I find peculiar since...

I’m on a 12h roster with a varied number of shifts per week, including every other Saturday and quite a bit of overtime. Prior to joining Network Rail I worked 08-16 Mon-Fri. My wife works 08-17 four days a week from home. We are fortunate in that our primary school has extremely flexible...

I’ve said it before a few times on this thread but I really love the job. Life in a lever frame box to me is ideal, I like the rhythm of the job where I get a decent amount of my own time whilst I’m at work to read a book, build models, do a spot of cleaning or whatnot - when the trains are...

Oh, no school run or anything like that whilst I was at IST. Just head down for the whole course. I needed the early starts and late finishes on the sim, not to mention revision and whatnot. I would have found it very hard to fit family life around it. I just tried to do enough that I could...

On our line it used to be that you’d normally get a 2 hour gap or so in the middle of a night shift but there’s been a big increase in the freight services over the last 2 or 3 years so that now you can do as much work on a night shift as on a day. The real benefit of nights for me is that you...

I changed careers 5 years ago from a 9-5 office job on £35k to a Grade 3 relief (+18%) in single-manned boxes and to be honest I wish I’d done it 10 years sooner. I get days off during the week when the kids are in school to do stuff around the house. When I am on a rest day I get to do both...