...............a postal franking machine service engineer.

Headed up North yesterday for my annual service run.

Left the house yestersday morning at 6.30am. After a couple of stops arrived in Thurso at 12.30pm. Carried out maintenane cheks on 5 customers' machines. Left for Wick and arrived at 4.00pm. 2 customers there. Left Wick and headed down to Durnoch for a B&B. Arrived 6.15pm and found a place to stay. Chippy tea.

Had a harty breakfast, ie stuffed ma face. 3 customers in Dornoch. Next stop distillery at Tain. No freebies

Phone call from office. Breakdown in Aberdeen. Left Tain 11.00am arrived Abderdeen 3.00pm. Not an easy fix finished at 5.00pm. Got home tonight 7.00pm.

Busy 2 days.

Hours driving 17
Hours worked 6
Miles driven 568
Diesel 1 1/4 tank

Did a similar run to Isle of Skye last month.

Not a typical day. Normal days are trips to Edinburgh or Aberdeen or Inverness or local. Or any combinationm of the above.

Alex

A fair bit o' galivantin Alex 

Hi John,

I average 1,000 miles a week. I'm off to Dunns on Monday to install a machine then Edinburgh for the rest of the day. Well that's the plan.

Alex

Blimey, Alex.
How on earth do you find time to do the amount of modelling you do

Hi newport,

I was off last week so got in quite a bit of modelling. I usually get home about 6 have tea, do the dishes, get Ali bathed and ready for bed, usually ckeck the forum out in between. By 9 Ali's in bed and from then 'till about 11 I do some modelling. Don't really watch that much telly, and even then it's somehting that comes on at 10 or I record it and watch it at the weekend.

Not much time at the weekends as SWMBO has a list for me to do   Nothing done tonight as we are getting a new roof and combi boiler fitted so the guy was in tonight giving us his battleplan.

If anyone else wants to post a day if their life then please go ahead....make our day.

Alex

568 miles, my boys do that in an hour ya big wuss 

Will that be goin' doon hill then?

Right then, as my latest purchase is being run in for the next hour, i'll have a go at this 'day in the life of...' thing. 

As some of you may know, I drive open top tour buses around Bath, occasional wedding hires in our Routemaster and various maintainence runs (mot's etc).

Today went like this....

Got up at 7.45 and trundled into work at about 9ish (nobody should ever rush to work ! ).
Checked my bus over and grabed brekkie and a brew off of the sandwich guy - still don't know his name, been here 10 years+.... . Drove into Bath to start first tour, all was going well until the commentry computer crashed  - back to the depot to fetch another bus then ! Got back into town and the sun is out, so loads of happy passengers and kept busy until my break. Changed route in the afternoon (we have 2 routes - one in the city, one into the hills) and it got quieter as the clouds came in and finished the day off with hail....

Got home at about 7ish, my Atlas CSX GP15 had arrived and i've fitted the dcc decoder from my Atlas GP7  as it's no longer needed (sound decoder in the post for that one  ).

Good news was that today was payday - so i finished the day off with a little treat -  'Miss Millies' (fried chicken of the highest order !!!) and a Bath Ale's 'Dark Side'.

And that's about it for today, same again tomorrow - almost !

I had a bit of a different morning yesterday which involved driving to each of the stations on the Preston to Ormskirk line and measuring the usable platform lengths using a trundle wheel.
Why you may ask?
This is normally a quiet, lightly used line and the service has been worked for several years using a single car class 153 unit which recently changed to a class 142 on weekdays, there is no Sunday service.
Today happens to be Grand National day at Aintree and we get an abnormal amount of passengers using the train as it's one of the easier ways of getting there and yes you guessed it they wont all fit into the booked class 153.
Our control managed to resource an additional class 156 to work in multiple with the 153 for the day but for safety reasons we had to be certain that each platform could accomodate a 69 metre train hence me going out and measuring each one.
Platform lengths are listed in the Sectional Appendix but there have been minor discrepancies in the past so I wanted to be certain and yes the train does fit!