5.00 AM

My day began early with my alarm waking me up before the sun had risen. I crawled out of bed, had a long shower, breakfast, then left to catch the bus to work. On my way to work I always enjoy listening to an audiobook, my current book is part of the Wheel of Time series.

6.30 AM

I arrived at the depot and said good morning to the team. While the electricians did admin to prepare for the day’s work, I did some of my office tasks (currently a bit of document management).

8.00 AM

We left the depot in the work vehicles and headed to today’s work site. On the way, we collected the testing equipment we needed from storage. While at the storage site some equipment was exchanged with a contactor.

9.00 AM

We arrived at the substation to begin our work. Today we tested all of the AC switchgear. This included function testing of the protection relays and insulation testing of the oil filled circuit breakers. All of todays tests were passed, indicating the equipment is in a good condition. Results are recorded and compared with prior test results so that any trends can be observed. 

1.00 PM

After finishing at the substation, we headed to a nearby cafe for a nice lunch. We all had quite similar lunches with some variation of bacon and eggs. Lunch is very important because “we can’t power the trains if we don’t power ourselves.”

2.00 PM

We arrived back at the depot. The electricians carried out some more admin work while I returned to the office to do some work (including writing out this dairy).

3.00 PM

We wrapped up for the day. Many of the electricians are parents, so they went to pick up their kids while I pop my audiobook back on and took the bus back home.