Thread: Load haul....
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Old 25th August 2010, 23:20
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HM181 HM181 is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: The Mill
Posts: 329
Load Haul happened one Monday morning when a new area manager rolled upto Healey Mills with a load of new management faces. The person who was i/c Load Haul was an ex signal man, who got a medal for moving coal in Coalville during the miners strike. This man smoked a pipe and stunk the place out.
At this time we got a new traincrew manager, he seemed a nice man .
He saw a senior driver tending a flower bed outside the HM messroom at 1300hrs one day. He was the afternoon shed man.
This manager asked the driver what he was doing and what turn he was on. The driver told him he was afternoon shedman. The driver thought nothing of this, the manager seemed a nice man.
The next day the afternoon shed turn was cancelled.
This set the tone of things to come.
I went to various meetings with Load Haul Management regarding thier bid for the full freight franchise.
These meetings were held at the Danum Hotel in Donny.
Off Course Load Haul lost thier bid, and we were lumbered with EWS.
Under Burkhart things were fine, we got bonuses at the end of the year.
At this time DRI was coming in for Drivers, this was about 1997 ish.
Soon after that we got a Canadian CEO. This man caused massive loss of traffic sheds and yards were closed .
Guard/ trainmen were included in DRI, and we all got a nice motorola brick mobile phone, which to me was a novelty. With this phone you could call any company mobile, send SMS and contact all the internal BR number nationwide, all for nowt.
As a trainman my wage went from £8500 with overtime to £16500 without overtime, and annualised hours. This was good as at the end of the year I owed them around 150 hours. If you were not required to work, you were booked off with pay.
Then in 2000 all the groundstaff were restructured and my wage went up again, but we lost the annualised hours but kept our mobile phones.
One Director of EWS told us that Freightliner would not be a problem to EWS, and that Great Central would not take off. On that I rest my case.
EWS gave away jobs to all and sundry.
Then the Canadian came with his macho management style and then things hit the dust along with the morale of all the company.

Last edited by HM181; 25th August 2010 at 23:24.
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