Timetabled C Stock west of Earls Court

I've just read through the last few messages since I mentioned C stock at Olympia over the weekend.. and wow, it proves what a superb community and source of information this is! I'm new here, so I don't like to bug those in the know for detailed information or risk asking about things that are not for the public to know, but the discussions about set workings, driver experiences & training + scheduling are fascinating.

I presume special set working book amendments are published for each individual weekend affected by engineering work sometime in advance of the date - or is there a "standard set of amendments for each case"? This weekend just gone was obviously a fairly complex variant on that standard weekend!

Train is cancelled and they become additional spares.

More or less, yes - there are however two exceptions.

As has already been mentioned, some pool drivers at Barking and Upminster are C stock trained. In theory all pool drivers are considered to be line based and are thus trained on both stocks and all routes.

It's far from simple though as ex-East London line drivers are kind of in the pool but kind of aren't, and are exempt from C stocks by local agreement. At Barking, as a result of the last timetable change, a number of drivers lost their place on the roster and were dumped back in the pool - I'm not 100% sure but I suspect they haven't been trained up on C stocks. Interestingly though, Barking did used to be C stock trained as they had one morning/evening run to/from Barking/Wimbledon.

The other often forgotten group are the I/O's (Instructor Operators) - all I/O's at Barking and Upminster are trained on both C's and D's, as well as all routes.

Ask away - if nobody asks anything it'd be a bit pointless having a forum!! And if anything is too sensitive to speak about, it just won't be spoken about!

Not quite - for the normal service we have the WTT (Working Timetable), which details everything about the train service (aside from drivers duties).

Set working books are only issued for SSR lines but are only of use to drivers as they only show a given trains destination and arrival/departure time. Set working books are therefore only ever issued for the proper WTT, never at any other time. Same applies to drivers duty books whilst we're on the subject.

For engineering works, an amended WTT is issued and that's all we actually need to run the service. Sometimes that particular WTT may be re-used on several different occasions, other times it may only be used once - that all depends on the requirements of the day.