Is the train driver assessment hard?

People ask this when they're deciding whether to apply, or whether to spend a month practising. They want a number. There isn't a public official one. Forum figures of 40 or 50 per cent are gossip. They are not a reason to skip the work, and they are not a reason not to apply.

What you can know without a number: a lot of capable people don't get through first time. That's enough to take it seriously. You don't need a forum percentage to decide whether to practise.

Hard in a specific way

It isn't hard like a maths contest. Most of the tasks are obvious once explained. It's hard like being asked to do an obvious thing accurately, for a long time, in a format you've never seen, after another format you've never seen.

Vigilance is the usual difficulty. Not because the rule is deep, but because thirty minutes of almost nothing is not the same as five minutes of almost nothing. Group Bourdon is the other: a simple rule in a dense field, scored on both speed and mess.

If you've never done either, the first sitting is partly about staying calm. That part you can train.

Why sitting the day without practice is expensive

Attempts are limited. There's usually a wait if you fail. So the first attempt isn't a free rehearsal. It's one of a small number of shots.

Practice doesn't buy you the official items. It buys you the feel of the day: where your hands go, how a miss feels, how long a minute is when nothing happens. A lot of the difficulty is just that unfamiliarity. Once it isn't new, you're left with the actual skill, which you either have or can build.

A useful definition of ready

You aren't ready just because you feel confident. You're closer when a full-length vigilance run is merely unpleasant, not chaotic. When you can do a concentration page without marking clusters that do not match. When a rules passage is still there after the page is hidden.

RailFocus will give you a practice score out of 100. Use it to see if this week's run is cleaner than last week's. Don't treat it as a prophecy of what the operator will print.

Is it hard? Yes. Is it mysterious? Only until you have sat the same kind of tasks a few times. After that it is just tiring, timed work.