It’s 4 weeks block leave on the valleys, not 5. 1 spring, 1 winter & 2 summer. So 16 block and 12 floating days. Depending on when Xmas falls you have to keep a day for that aswell.
Regarding shifts, you could end up with 2 weeks of afternoons on a trot (not often) but generally it alternates between earlies and afternoons with some days chucked in now and then. Nights come around 3/4 times a year.
We've got the option at my depot of only taking 4 block weeks and having the fifth as extra floating days instead, I didn't know that was the normal way of doing things on the Valleys.
Appreciate that thank you, I might have missed something but how do Sundays work?
Looking at the shifts you’ve said I presuming you’re not rostered to work sundays for the 4 day week.
Is it down to skeleton staff and turns taken?
Thanks again
I left them out because again they're complicated
Sundays are outside the working week - your basic pay is based on a 35 hour week where you work on 4 out of 6 days a week as shown above.
Additionally to that, you are rostered to work a certain amount of Sundays - the exact amount varies per depot between 1 in 3 and 1 in 6, and i believe the Valleys have fairly few Sundays (Sunday service levels have traditionally been a lot lower on the Valleys than they have on Mainline. My depot runs nearly a full service on a Sunday).
If it's your rostered Sunday and you choose to work it, you get paid it as overtime at an enhanced rate (I won't say how enhanced as again I believe that varies between depots). If you don't want to work it, you can either find someone else to do it yourself or ask resources to find a volunteer, and then they do it and get the overtime.
However, if there is nobody else who wants to do it then you're stuck with it as enforced overtime. Pretty rare for that scenario to happen - normally every depot has a bunch of keen drivers who do as much overtime as they can who'll happily take it off you, but it can happen.
Naturally there are a whole load of exemptions to the above rules involving things like annual leave and golden tickets but it starts getting very complicated and genuinely the best advice i can give is not to worry about it, it'll all be explained by someone more qualified than me when you get here. Plus I might have inadvertently made more assumptions about the Valleys that aren't true for the rest of the network.
And then there's the minor issue that a whole set of negotiations are currently taking place between ASLEF and TfW regarding making changes to our T&C's, and it's known that one of TfW's goals is to bring Sundays inside the working week, so this all might change again in a year or two! Again, don't let it bother you. It'll all become apparent in time - and at the end of the day, it's still a fantastic job you won't regret persuing.
