Steve Gravestock, 24, is in his first month of training to do a job countless people would love to do – he is a train driver in the making.
He beat 100 other people to get a place on the Abellio Greater Anglian training course.
The minimum age for recruits is 21. Plenty of trainees are in their fifties, but oldest recent recruit was 65.
Ricky Aldworth, the recruitment specialist who conducts initial assessments for Greater Anglia, says: “Our trainees have all sorts of backgrounds. Often they have a record in the services, but selection is less about their previous experience than about their capacity for this particular job.”
Nowadays, about 25 per cent of applicants are women.
Abellio Greater Anglia does not need to advertise its training course vacancies. Job alerts are posted without announcement on the company’s website. A surge of applications follows, and the window is quickly closed.
Ricky says: “We don’t have any problem getting the right people.”
Physically, a driver needs strong hand-and-eye co-ordination. They also need a good memory, since a key part of the job is the need to know every feature, big and small, of the tracks across the Greater Anglia franchise area. Signals, points, gradients, speed limits, must all be imprinted on the driver’s brain.
Ricky says: “A driver also needs to be calm in a challenging situation.
“Most of their time is spent in a cab alone, so it may not be a job for a ‘a people person’. But equally it’s a public service, so you don’t want someone who absolutely hates the public.”
Steve, from Mistley, ticked all the boxes, including enthusiasm.
He says: “I’d set my sights on this job and worked in bars until a job came up on the railways.”
Steve will train for between nine months and one year, depending on his progress. The course combines classroom work at Abelio Great Anglia’s centre, in Stratford, with hands-on work on the tracks, starting in one of the depots.
He can expect to complete about 225 hours driving time with an instructor before he qualifies, working both the stop-start suburban routes, such as the Liverpool Street to Southend Victoria line, and the longer-haul West Anglian route via Chelmsford and Ipswich to Norwich.
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