Good morning guys, I hope this post finds you all well and good.
I have been driving double decker buses for the last few months as a bit of a change, but to be honest with you I hate it, I don’t like dealing with members of the public and don’t like the cash handling, and the company leave a bit to be desired, they dont treat you very well, so this saturday Im doing an assessment for a company working out of Bristol and Southampton docks tramping (3 - 4 nights out a week)
I have not used my digital tacho card for quite a while, when I get into the lorry at the weekend for my assessment drive will I have to make any manual entry before I move off?? Im a bit rusty with the digital tacho stuff??
It’s difficult to say whether or not you’ll need to do a manual entry because we don’t know what type of tachograph you’ll be using, if the vehicle is pre 2012 it’s most likely to be a type 1 digital tachograph in which case you won’t need to do a manual entry.
However if it’s a type 2 digital tachograph you need to make sure the time since the card was last ejected is recorded with the ? symbol.
I can only speak from my own experience about driver assessments but I’ve always found assessors to be friendly and helpful, after explaining to the assessor that I hadn’t used a digital tachograph for a while I would have no problems asking the assessor to check that I was doing the manual entry correctly, it’s been my experience that most assessors would prefer that to watching you fumble about trying to look like you know exactly what you’re doing.
We are all of course assuming that the “Company Assessor” knows anything at all about Digital Tachographs. Don’t forget to set OW for your walk round check!! Good Luck
