Today's discussion about the news

Maybe she should have done more research prior.

Hot off the press:

The real problem with the train unions is it creates driver shortages, which regularly affects services.

nicely illustrated by the chart

That's clearly a self-explanatory chart.

It's just that I can't for the life of me work out what it explains.

It's instructions for a wall mounted TV bracket. Duh.

This is not terribly relevant.

There's a vet shortage in the UK. Why is that? Answer because it is long hours hard work and you have to train for years and be smart in the first place. The reason, basically, is not many people can do it in the first place, so there is a comparatively tiny pool of people to select from.

Evidently lots of people can be train drivers and even more want to be because it is so well paid.

It's going to be progressively automated as well. The unions will then be responsible for the continued existence of train drivers.

Actually, it's an eye test. The red dot is right in the middle.

If a train driver gets it wrong, people are more likely to be late for work...

The Royal College sets the number of places in schools. It requires a lot of skills, many of which are not covered by science A-levels. The entry requirements are set that high to restrict access. A lot of people think they can be train drivers but very few are successful. Automation has not extended past the Victoria line and the DLR in 40 years for the reasons I explained the other day. The number of vets is relatively steady, but people have bought a lot of pets in the last 5 years and then we were somewhat less friendly to all the European vets.

So you've lived out in the country then?

Like I said it's nothing to do with how qualified you are, it's the value of the role. One train driver is more valuable to their employer than one vet is to their employer.

If automation was viable for open networks do you not think someone would have introduced it by now somewhere in the world? They haven't because there's not enough benefit from the massive investment needed to develop and implement it. I mean seriously, do you think Siemens or Hitachi have a load of prototypes sat on the shelf just because whatsisname has said hid members have concerns? We haven't even got the UK network all up to the same signalling standard.

Key point is that you need a perfectly aligned infrastructure. In this country? Pah! Everything is done on a shoestring by hodge-it and budge-it.

I suspect we won't be the first to implement new technologies.

However, if technology encroaches on the job, requiring less human intervention (at least on board) and increasing safety - which is already the case - then why does the value of the bloke sitting in a cab continue to rise? And why are they paid literally twice the amount of their peers on the continent?

RC is actually right, that the unions are vested in maintaining the status quo whereby the lucrative "overtime" is in fact necessary, then leveraging the minutia of the terms of that overtime to inflate overall T&Cs.

It won't be long before an automous Robot will be able to walk onto the train and press the brake/accelerator. It could probably do the locamotion whilst it's at it.

It seems wrong to call a Robot it. Robots will have feeling too.

All fair points but who is going to implement it, and pay for it?

I suspect this discussion will still be happening in 10 years time.