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Every operator runs this slightly differently, and anything below that contradicts your invite letter — the letter wins. But the shape is remarkably consistent across the industry, because most operators buy the same assessments from the same two suppliers and administer them to the same script.

What Stage 1 and Stage 2 actually mean

The names are not standard. Some operators call the whole psychometric day "Stage 1" and the interview "Stage 2". Others split the tests themselves: a morning of paper-and-screen attention and rules tests, then a separate block of computer-based perception and co-ordination tests from the Vienna Test System. A few compress everything into one long day.

The practical split, and the one used across this site, is by kind of test:

• The attention and rules battery — Group Bourdon, TEA-Occ, TRP1b, TRP2, DFFT. Timed, heavily scored on errors, mostly worked with a pencil or a mouse at your own pace within a hard limit.
• The Vienna tests — ATAVT, WAFV, 2HAND, sometimes the Determination Test. Computer-driven, with a response panel, and paced by the machine rather than by you.
• Judgement and the interview — the situational exercises and the MMI, the structured multi-modal interview, sometimes on the same day, often a week or two later. The second interview, the DMI with a drivers' manager, is almost always a separate trip.

If your letter names tests you do not recognise, the guide to test variants translates the acronyms.

The shape of the day

Assume roughly this, and treat anything faster as a bonus:

• Arrival and ID. Photo ID is checked against the name on the invite. Turn up thirty minutes early; the trains you will one day drive are not running for your convenience today.
• Briefing. A short talk about the role, the day, and the fact that results are not given out in the room. This is not assessed, but you are being watched from the car park onwards in the informal sense that everyone is.
• The test block. Two to four hours, split into short tests with the administrator reading standard instructions before each one. Breaks are brief and not always where you would want them.
• The Vienna block. Usually in a separate room, at individual machines, often with a headset and a response panel. This is where the thirty-minute vigilance test sits, and it is the longest single sitting of the day.
• Judgement exercises and the MMI. Either after lunch or on another date. Your situational judgement answers feed the interview, so the two belong together.

How the tests are administered

This is the part that surprises people, and it is worth rehearsing more than the content.

• Instructions are read from a script, once. The administrator cannot rephrase them into your own words or give you a worked example beyond the standard practice items. Questions are taken before the clock starts and not after.
• There are practice items, and they are short. Two or three, then the real thing. If you have never seen the format, the practice items are not long enough to learn it — which is the entire argument for doing this at home first.
• The clock is hard. On a timed paper, "stop" means pencil down mid-word. On the machine tests, the test ends itself and there is no way to go back.
• You cannot return to an earlier section. Not on the papers with parts, not on the computer tests. A part you rushed is gone.
• Scrap paper and pencils are provided. Do not bring your own and do not write on the question paper unless you are told you may.

What to take

• Photo ID, and whatever the letter specifically asks for — some operators want your licence or passport, not just any ID.
• Glasses or contact lenses if you use them, and your usual prescription rather than an old pair. Several tests are small-detail visual search under time.
• Water, and food for a break that may be shorter than you expect.
• Your normal amount of caffeine. The day is not the time to discover what three coffees do to a co-ordination test, and it is equally not the time to quit.

Phones go away for the whole block. Assume you will not see yours between the briefing and lunch.

The bits nobody warns you about

• The room is warm and the afternoon is long. The vigilance test is deliberately dull and it is often late in the day. That combination is the design, not bad luck.
• The first test starts faster than you expect. People lose the opening thirty seconds of Group Bourdon working out the format they were told about ninety seconds earlier.
• Everyone around you sounds faster. Pencils on paper carry. It means nothing — a fast pencil is often a careless one, and errors are penalised.
• Nobody tells you how you did. Results usually arrive by email days later, sometimes as a single line with no scores.
• One bad test does not end it, and you will not know which one was bad. Candidates routinely leave convinced they failed the test they passed comfortably.

Afterwards

Expect a wait of a few days to a few weeks, depending on how many people the operator is putting through. Feedback, if it comes at all, is usually a sentence rather than a score sheet — you can ask, and some operators will tell you which area let you down.

The attempts you get are set industry-wide rather than operator by operator: three for candidates who started the standardised process on or after 7 December 2024, two for anyone who had sat any part of it before then, with a year between the first and second and five years from the first before a third. Results sit on a national database, so a sitting elsewhere counts. The rules in full are here, and they are the reason to treat a first attempt as the expensive thing it is.

If you pass the tests there is still the DMI — a second interview with a drivers' manager — a medical including colour vision, hearing and general fitness, and reference and safety-critical checks. None of that is a formality, but none of it is what this site is for.

What to do with this

Read which tests you will actually sit, then pick the two that worry you most and sit the exam version of each tonight. Not the practice version — the exam one, with the clock, on the biggest screen you have. The number will be worse than you expect and that is the useful part.