Max Stafford's Kennel

One thing I am sure you can hardly fail to have noticed, particularly if you are one of my long-term followers is the sporadic nature of my blog posts over the last seven years.

Events over the last year finally clarified why, what a decade ago was a relative busy blog had tailed away to virtually zero. Quite simply, the issue was mental energy. Those of you who remember the old days will remember how, out of necessity, I took a job on the buses. Now, while I enjoyed that on the basic level of driving a big vehicle around, it does involve a huge amount of concentration and when you’re carrying out such a task over a long shift, it  leaves you mentally drained and that’s before we even consider the physical conditions that go with driving worn and often superannuated machinery over the under maintained and crumbling infrastructure of a country foundering under the curse of Neoliberal ideological dogma.  When I worked in Carlisle, there was at least a reliable rest day pattern which gave you a good break and a predictable pattern of days off that helped you plan some sort of life off the pitch.

Once I came north, I remained part time, but at the small depot where I was based, there was no discernable rest day pattern and I would only know my days of duty for the week on the Thursday of the previous week. A full weekend off was also a rare luxury. On top of this, the depot had lost some key duties and for the full time drivers, a four day week had been introduced. That naturally led to longer shifts and while it was a win for them, for me it meant longer shifts which, having gone part time to have more of a life in the first instance, basically meant that I was now doing 10-12 hour shifts every duty. With a regime of unpaid breaks, this meant I was doing the equivalent of a 32-36 hour week, generally for about 28 hours pay. Increasingly, fatigue was setting in and I could feel myself getting into the sort of unhappy place that I had been in a decade before in a previous career and which you can read about in my posts from the time. I felt, given I had worked on the periphery of the rail industry before that there were ominous signs (the attached garage at the depot had closed in March, school contracts lost, and worst of all, the mess room and controller’s office had just been re-decorated; the railway curse!) that things were not looking good for the depot. I had barely made the decision to call it a day when official word came that the depot was slated for closure and, given we were about to move into the school holiday period in NE Scotland which generally meant a period of easier, shorter duties, I elected to stick it out for a few more weeks and get a redundancy payout.

This I did, and on the 19th of August, Stonehaven depot closed and my career on the buses came to an end. Whilst I was glad to get away from the long shifts and decreasing variety of runs, I don’t regret having done the job and I’m proud of the skills I learnt and the chance I had to serve the people of Cumberland and Aberdeenshire in those seven years. Whilst I’m done with the buses in one sense, I intend to keep my entitlement in order to have a crack at driving heritage machines as a volunteer with Angus Transport Group or a similar outfit in these parts.

Meanwhile, I need to get myself a new bit of work but over the last two months I have been both decompressing and adjusting and catching up with the great backlog of work I’ve had to tackle in the garden, in the house (more for the winter that) and getting back into modelling (yes, that thing that used to happen on this blog and that you used to come here to see, remember?).

Anyway, I need to keep some material back for subsequent posts and it’s getting late now.

There WILL be another post tomorrow but I’ll finish off tonight with some images of those last days of the Stoney Bluebirds, some by me and some by my pal, Bob Reid who was out with the camera when I came in to Stonehaven on my last run with the Bluebird pet E300, no 27800.

I was delighted to be able to knock it on the head at the wheel of this fine machine!