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What these guides are built from

• The regulations and the industry standards. For everything in the getting-in guides — age, education, the medical, the attempts rule, the licence — the source is the primary document rather than somebody's summary of it. Those are listed below with dates, because this is the part of the subject that actually changes.
• Test publishers' own public descriptions. The suppliers describe what each instrument measures, how long it runs and what a response looks like. That is the backbone of every format note here.
• Candidate accounts. Forum threads written days after a sitting are the best available source on what the room is like, what the administrator says, and where people lose time. They are unreliable on numbers and excellent on texture.
• Other practice providers. Where several independent providers describe a format the same way, that is decent evidence. Where they disagree, we say so rather than picking the confident-sounding one.
• Open-source simulators. For the Vienna tests especially, someone has usually built a working reimplementation, and reading its source tells you more about the timing of a test than any prose description.

The official sources, with dates

These are the documents the career and eligibility guides are written against. If something here disagrees with a practice provider, believe these.

• The Train Driving Licences and Certificates Regulations 2010 — the law. Schedule 1 carries the medical and psychological standards, including the vision and hearing numbers and the three-yearly medical.
• The Train Driving Licences and Certificates (Amendment) Regulations 2026 — lowered the minimum age from 20 to 18, in force 30 June 2026.
• Lowering the minimum train driver age to 18: rail industry implementation plan (DfT) — what the industry agreed to alongside the change, including the 17½ apprenticeship entry age.
• RSSB and RACF, Frequently asked questions: RIS-3751-TOM issue four, December 2024 — the source for the test-by-criterion table, the three-attempt rule and its timings, the five-year validity, the one-application-at-a-time guidance, adjustments, and the fact that the standard sets no pass marks.
• Office of Rail and Road — train driving licences and certificates — the licence itself, what it covers, and how it differs from the certificate your employer issues.
• The Train Drivers Academy — the Rail Delivery Group's own front door for people wanting to get in, and the best starting point for finding live vacancies by region.
• National Careers Service — train driver — the routes in, and a conservative salary range.
• RSSB — minimum age of train drivers — the research that preceded the age change, and worth reading if you want to know why experience rather than age is the thing being measured.

The material worth your own time

These are other people's sites, listed because they are useful, not because we are paid to list them. Several sell practice packs; some material is free.

• Train Driver Practice Tests — practice versions of most of the battery, sold as a one-off pack.
• Train Driver Pro — Group Bourdon, TRP1, TEA-Occ, WAFV, ATAVT and SJT practice, plus a community.
• RailPrep practice pack — printable material with timing instructions, which suits the paper tests better than a screen does.
• How2Become — Train Driver Tests — long-running guides and question banks, including the ATAVT and TEA-Occ write-ups.
• Practice Aptitude Tests — train driver — free sample questions and a readable overview of the selection process.
• Practice Reasoning Tests — train driver — psychometric examples and notes on the variants such as RAAT and SCAAT.
• TrainDriver.org — background on the career as a whole from a driver of thirty years, rather than test practice. Good on what the job is actually like; the practice material it points at is paid and sold through a partner.
• vienna-determination-test-simulator — an open-source web reimplementation of the Determination Test. Free, and the closest thing to the real pacing that exists publicly.
• RailUK Forums — ATAVT and the Vienna system — candidate accounts of the Vienna block, and the wider forum is the best source on individual operators' processes.
• Vienna Test System — what the suite is, who publishes it, and which modules exist.

What we deliberately do not claim

• Pass marks. Cut-offs are set by each operator, are not published, and change with how many people they need. Anyone quoting you a number is guessing.
• Exact item counts and timings for every operator. The lengths used in the simulators are the commonly reported ones. Yours may differ by a part or a minute. The habit you build is what transfers, not the arithmetic.
• Real test content. No licensed item appears anywhere on this site. Every exercise, scenario, passage and photograph here is original work built to the published description of the test it drills.
• That practice is the whole story. These tests are measuring something real. Practice removes the penalty for unfamiliarity and fixes your pacing; it does not rewrite you.
• Any individual operator's current policy. Ages, qualifications, depot distances, salaries and which tests are used are set company by company and move. The legal and standard-level facts here are sourced and dated; the operator-level ones are patterns, and the advert in front of you beats them.
• Whether you will pass a medical. We can tell you what the standards say. Only an examining doctor can tell you what they mean for you.

Found something wrong?

If you have sat the real thing recently and something here does not match what you saw, that is worth more to the next reader than anything we can infer from a description. Tell us what test, which operator, and what was different, and it gets corrected with the date on it.