Uh-oh... looks like the gritters are staying at home...

... because, as I drove in to work at 04:40 this morning, the snow was falling fairly thickly, and the road was covered in it - with no sign of it having been gritted since yesterday.

So, (with a tad of editing later to make this more coherent) let's go with the flow, and see how a shift works - or doesn't - when the gritters take a day off, and it snows heavily...

Arriving at work, 05:15 or so...

I expect we'll see a token presence of gritters later, but for now, I'm expecting a fair number of silly and avoidable 'amateur hour' collisions to happen today.

We shall see... more later...!

06:02...

OK, got my bus, did my walk round, got it up the really steep hill to the eastern end of the route, and as I thought, the gritters are all on a day off by the look of it. The road conditions are... challenging, to say the least, and I expect that the roads'll come to a standstill before long, when the kiddie-run hour hits.

Looks like it's gonna be another loooooooong day....

11:08...

Well, this was an interesting round and a half - NOT.

Traffic was worse than last weeks' mess, with queues all over the place. Most times, it was a less than five mile per hour crawl from one queue of stopped traffic to the next, kind of like a five yard slug race.

Finding myself running very late (half an hour at one point), I'd radioed control to ask if they knew if the gritters would be out to play any time soon, and was told that they hadn't a clue, and if I wanted to know, to call Centrecomm on "code blue" (we have two ways of calling Centrecomm on the radio - Code red (emergencies only, a bit like the 999 system) and Code Blue (non-Emergency), and by the way, could I let them know what Centrecomm said, please?

Well, on calling Code Blue, and outlining the question, I was told that the gritters had "packed it in to go to bed at 1 am", and that they "hadn't a clue when they'd be out to play again" (can someone change the blasted script, please?!). Oh joy. Well, I relayed this to control, much good did it do any of us, and went back to regarding the exhaust pipes of cars in front of me again...

We eventually only saw one gritter - and that was rather ironically stuck in traffic (photo left), and to cap it all, when I should have been at the western end of the route, on my meal break, I was in fact close to ten miles away at the eastern end of the route, trying not to get stuck on the turning point before coming back again (it was well slippery).

Luckily, control took pity, and ran me light (empty) back to the relief point, so I could have a late meal relief - this, they don't really like doing, but sometimes it's the only thing they can do to get things back to a semblance of normality!

We shall see how the rest of the shift pans out later....

11:45 or so...

Well, after an abbreviated late meal relief, I was directed to take my second bus two-thirds the way down the route, and spin round at the bus station there, to come back on time. Well, ok, fair enough, thinks I. Not unreasonable, given the mess on the roads, and actually quite a good "turn", as we call such a curtailment.

12:50...

No sooner do I get there, than the controller there comes up and tells me to run ten minutes early back again!

Now, I know the schedule had been torn up, shredded, and set on fire again, but this was only gonna make my next set of passengers ready to set fire to the bus, let alone the time table!

13:50...

How wrong was I?!

The controller had failed to tell me that that my leading bus (the one in front, in other words) had broken down (the exit doors were stuck!), and when I got to it, they were so pleased to see my bus (earlier than expected), that they thanked me profusely and that, as they say, was that - the traffic had calmed down or gone home, the roads had by now been gritted at least once and were passably safe to use, and I got back to the start point in plenty of time and with the get out of trouble instruction "WTI ADV +11 (NLM)" plastered on the back of my log card... translated to somewhat more understandable English that means, by the way, "Working To Instruction, ADVance eleven minutes (ahead of schedule), No Lost Mileage" to wave at the start point controller!

Even my ferry back to the depot was on time!

Not a bad shift, all things considered!