Biggest Depot

[dmacw]

Which depot of a TOC has the most staff employed.

How is this broken down between drivers, guards etc.

How does this compare against other depots of the same TOC. For example Wick may have 4 guards? Against many more at Glasgow Central?

 

[Cherry_Picker]

This is the wrong forum and getting an exact answer is difficult because nobody really knows, and even if you get somebody from every company to answer you still end up with the situation where multiple companies have staff at the same depot. There are hundreds of train crew based at Birmingham New Street for example, but they are split between LM, XC and Virgin. This situation is almost certainly repeated at most of the really big railway stations and depots in the country.

 

[Bellwater]

Birmingham New Street in Central Days, now London Waterloo(South West Trains)would be my guess.

 

[Matt Taylor]

I believe Waterloo has 300 guards.

 

[dmacw]

I believe Waterloo has 300 guards.

Do any SWT depots work on a link system?

 

[western Champion]

This is the wrong forum and getting an exact answer is difficult because nobody really knows, and even if you get somebody from every company to answer you still end up with the situation where multiple companies have staff at the same depot. There are hundreds of train crew based at Birmingham New Street for example, but they are split between LM, XC and Virgin. This situation is almost certainly repeated at most of the really big railway stations and depots in the country.

There are no VT train crew at New St.

VT depots are Euston, Wolves, Man Picc, Liverpool, Preston, Glasgow and Edinburgh. All of which have Drivers and TMs

Additionally there are TMs based at Holyhead, the drivers coming from Piccadilly and Liverpool

I was at New St from Feb 89 to May 98. When the drivers transferred up from Saltley in the early 90s there were roughly 280 drivers at New St pre privatisation.

 

[francisoldfield]

fratton has a link system and waterloo as well I believe

 

[Bridge189]

Newcastle must be up there with hundreds of staff at both EC and northern. They also have smaller TPE and XC onboard crew bases. I would hazard a guess that Leeds will be a large staff hub too.

 

[Safety365]

fratton has a link system and waterloo as well I believe

Salisbury has got rid of their link system. They have 4 links, with names not numbers. They all sign the same routes and there is no progression from one link to another.

 

[westcoaster]

Bedford has over 200 drivers spread across 7 links.

 

[Geeves]

I believe Manchester Victoria has around 150 Drivers and approximately the same number of guards. It also uses the link system although some links have been reduced recently.

As far I know (and im not train crew) they would like to see the links reduced so that every driver signs all routes except two. One link will sign to Chester via Altrincham or Warrington Bank Quay and the other signing to Leeds via Bradford or Brighouse.

Also in regards to Newcastle depot I dont believe its particularly large. That depot having most of its area also covered by other depots. Carlisle, Middlesborough and York for ECS work.

The largest Northern depot is going to probably be Leeds 150 to 200 drivers at that depot. The smallest would probably be Workington or Barrow.

 

[pmgarvey]

Sorry, but what's a link?

 

[driver9000]

Sorry, but what's a link?

A roster. Traditionally railway depots had multiple links and were based on seniority. For example a depot with 4 links numbered 1 to 4, link 4 would be the bottom link populated by the juniors of the depot as your seniority progressed you would move up the links gradually taking on more work and also more varied work with less of the 'bad' turns until you reached link 1 which was populated by the seniors of the depot and they would often be working the expresses. Today some TOCs have done away with progressive links either opting for a single link or having multiple links which do differing work outside of the depots base workload (the latter is how we work at my depot since we stopped progressive linking).

 

[Cherry_Picker]

So for example, if you were at Birmingham New Street and in the bottom link then you would get to go to Lichfield City and back five times in a shift, but if you were in the top link then you would have a nice run to Cambridge or Preston or somewhere. It's not exactly like that any more but the basic principle is the same. Link 1 covers a certain number of routes and type of traction, Link 2 different routes and traction, Link 3 different stuff again (and so on) and while there would be plenty of overlap between the links, eg the guys in Link 1 would sign the traction and some of the routes Link 3 get every day, there are several different groups of drivers working off of different rosters. It makes organising everything a lot less complicated at a big depot as you are basically breaking the work down into bite sized chunks.