General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

OC

Regular rail users are faced with cancellations on a regular basis mainly because of lack of drivers. A problem entirely down to poor top management, a group of highly paid individuals who couldn’t hold a candle to their equivalent in the old BR.
The driver shortage is down to a clash of two pension systems. In the BR days drivers started as apprentices and worked their way up to driver status doing a variety of non driver tasks. In the franchise system drivers are recruited from a much older cohort and trained to drive the locos plus route learning and signalling etc. The exception being Virgin who poached drivers from other companies.
A few years ago a sizeable number of BR apprentice trained drivers and a sizeable number of trainee recruits in the franchised system came up for retirement simultaneously. With hindsight it was obviously a problem not foreseen by the current ‘semi skilled’ top executives of the railway companies.
Covid put a stop to training thus exacerbating the problem.
It will now take years to get to a sufficient number of train drivers to deliver regular on time services with a minimum of cancellations.