The Parts List:

Derek White
Training Manager & Le Grand Fromage

Derek was brought up in a small terraced house in Norwich. Oddly, the rest of the White family lived in a well-landed Georgian farmhouse in Surrey and they have consistently denied the existence of Norwich, Norfolk and, indeed, the whole of East Anglia ever since.

Having achieved an A-grade in everything when he left school, the Department of Education promptly removed GCSE Everything from their list of examination subjects. Undeterred, Derek went in to the Royal Navy the following morning as soon as it opened and rose to the rank of Rear-Arch Admiral before being thrown out at closing time by the pub’s landlord.

In search of any good career and easy money, Derek then joined the railway as a Sleeper and worked his way up to Second Shovel over the course of several hours before falling into training. Having repaired the step at the entrance doorway to the Training Department, he became the Grand Fromage of TES Training and intends to remain so until his appointment as International Tropical Beach Tester for The Well-Heeled Gent Monthly Gazette is confirmed. An announcement that is due any day now. Apparently.

He's still searching for the easy money.

Sarah Punt
Administration Manager & Coffee Pod Strategist

According to Sarah’s confidential personnel file from MI4¾ (recently released from the Public Records Office under the Thirty Year Rule - and shortly to be put back again under the hastily enacted Another Thirty Year Rule), Sarah is a stickler for detail, audits, filling files, filing files and not deleting anything. Except this. This'll disappear any second now.

Having tired of being a high-powered, big-hitting, globe-trotting Mrs Fixit for ICI (a small British chemical company that used to be a large global one), Sarah has brought her chemical explosive sales skills to the specialised world of rail training and excels at making sure that Derek’s best ideas remain exactly that – ideas.

Sarah knows where the easy money is, but isn't telling anyone.

Allan Evans
Training Director & Le Grand Fromage Alternatif

The Enhanced Disclosure Application is still in progress. However, after a recent First Aid course, it has become clear that Allan's solution for a medical emergency - slight bleed, snapped limb, terminal deaded to death - is the very rapid and very firm application of an EpiPen.*

Allan has heard rumours about the easy money.

* Allan doesn't run First Aid courses.

Hollie Mortimer
Competency Management

A call from Hollie means that you’re about to become the dreaded “NLC” (No Longer Competent), but does give a slightly less scary interpretation to the phrase "You're going down".
 
In an earlier decade, Hollie would have a reason for Turing to decide that Colossus wasn’t worth the effort – nothing numerical gets past Hollie, be it the date a competence goes down for a given person next year or how many things are on Sarah’s To Do List that haven’t been done yet. The similarities between Sarah’s To Do List and the output of Enigma - the very thing that Colossus was designed to crack - are perhaps not unconnected.

However, this eye to detail doesn’t necessarily extend to non-numerical data… like having clothes on the right way around or even the right side out. But if there’s ever to be a Bin Filling event in the 2024 Olympics then Team GB's Gold is right here... back to front and inside out.

Kevin Hawkins
Safety Trainer and Assessor

Kevin started out on the railway as a temporary job – at least until he found a proper job.

He didn’t.

He was told by the Old Boys in his day (supposedly 1959, but 1859 and meeting "the splendid Mr Brunel" keep coming up in conversation) that if he was here for six months then he’d be here for life.

He’s still here.

To be here so long he must have committed a heinous crime, as you don’t get this long for murder. It is alleged that the crime that he committed was being caught red-handed not only doing a whole day’s work – but also that he did not get lost getting there and, worse still, using a modern-fangled computery thing. The IT department would far rather he didn't.

He has always vigorously denied all such allegations.

In his defence there is good evidence (and witnesses) to show that this is not the case - at least with computers. Kevin claims this to be a miscarriage of justice and is attempting to crowdfund his defence and (immediate subsequent) retirement. Unfortunately, since Kevin doesn't really do the intramanetwebthing, he's unaware that "crowdfunding" is different from "agitated mob with flaming torches".

In the meantime... he’ll do you a safety course.

Mike Allmey
Safety Trainer and Assessor

Mike has been a railway trainer since 2007, having escaped to the railway in early 2003 from the worlds of large-scale IT and telecoms network planning for BT, NTL, Virgin Media and Transco 186K “by accident”. (He claims that most people in the railway are caused by accidents.) He’s also spent a lot of time since the early nineties in various theatres as a lighting designer / rigger / operator, so if he says something along the lines of “I had Richard Digance on stage last weekend”, it’s not a euphemism. He did.

Having found himself in the rail world, Mike worked his way up from Assistant Broom Handle to S&T Faulting & Maintenance for the then-new Network Rail which paved the way to him becoming an S&T Trainer in 2007, covering the basic courses up to SMTH and SSI. Somehow he picked up safety training along the way, starting with PTS and upwards to COSS and then SWL1, being amongst the first trainers to deliver this. Quite how this has been allowed is a subject of debate, if not outright mystery.

Mike's other subjects of debate and outright mystery include:

• The 1999 Edinburgh Fringe Festival: What Happened to the Venue Stage Manager?
• The Red Signal: No-one Never Touched Nothing
• The Black Signal: Not Me, Honest
• Three Land Rovers: Enough, or Just One More?
• Four Land Rovers: Enough, or Just One More?

Jake Dow
Apprentice & NVQ Assessor

Rae Robinson
Safety Trainer and Assessor

Bill Bryan
Safety Assessor

Willie Hurst
Safety Assessor

Barry Lunt
Safety Assessor

John Kanaris
Safety Assessor

Having watched rather too much Captain Pugwash as an impressionable schoolboy, John’s working life started as a deck boy off Africa’s west coast. Eventually he was promoted and allowed to stay inside the hull. This maritime idyll was abruptly spoiled when the MOD actioned its plan to recapture the Falklands – a plan that, according to John, simply stated “Send Kanaris and a RO-RO ferry to Port Stanley”. So they did.
 
Having failed to follow the plan* in full, John was allowed to spend the next few years floating around the Caribbean carrying out the role of International Tropical Beach Tester for The Well-Heeled Gent Monthly Gazette. However, eventually his Cunard lilo became rather too prone to unexpected deflation so John thought he would try the easy money instead.
 
Like Derek, John started on the railway as a Sleeper and progressed upward through shovelling on to ATWS and Track02, then quality management, then into safety management and now higher-level project management, all of which means that, as an Assessor, John has actually done it. In Port Stanley. Over the deck guardrail. Hence John's standard advice to a new COSS: "Don't mess with the penguins".

* The MOD's 'Operation Kanaris' was a five-step plan of minimal expense, and is reproduced here in full:
1. Get on a ferry.
2. Go to Port Stanley.
3. Re-open the public telephone box.
4. Don't mess with the penguins.
5. Don't come back.
It's generally believed that the first three steps went to plan.

Jessica Martin
Administration Apprentice