It’s not supposed to happen this way

Tags

irony - i duz it, mini adventure, train, tube

Today I have been mostly investigating the rules of irony. It turns out they are set in stone.

I had a slightly puzzling start with two spurious defects before I’d even got out of a siding. I say “spurious” but I’m not entirely sure. The trains have been acting funny lately with all sorts of things happening that shouldn’t. The current favourite game in the messroom is chucking around theories on what went wrong with particular trains and how to fix them. As I was alone in the siding I didn’t have anyone to bounce ideas off but I did spend some time trying to work out how the train could have been defective. For the first defect I couldn’t come up with anything mechanical. When you find yourself seriously considering the actions of a passing badger in the middle of the night you realise you might need a bit more coffee. So I had some and continued to think about badgers. It really was the only explanation for what was otherwise a logical impossibility. The second was a bit strange and I couldn’t fathom that one.

Once I got going the train seemed fine. I was met by a manager further down the line who informed me he was assessing me today. We regularly get assessed on various elements of our jobs and sometimes that involves a manager being present in the cab and sometimes just hiding out in the back. Depending on who the manager is it can be quite fun to have some company for a bit to distract you from the badgers.

Sometimes assessments require us to drive in and out of depots, stable trains or to drive or brake in a particular way to demonstrate competency. Today’s was more or less just about driving around so not very intimidating and I just got on with the routine. Routine is a pretty important part of doing this job – many mishaps are averted by learning to do something in one particular way and then doing it that way forever more. Getting taken off a train and put in a classroom to be assessed is more difficult because then I’d be trying to consciously remember automatic behaviours while being completely out of context.

We zipped up and down for a bit then pulled into the terminus. At which point I decided that although I only had a few minutes before I needed to get going again,  more coffee was a necessity. The assessing manager grabbed his coat, handed me mine as I got my bag and we shot outside to the coffee shop. As we wandered back I realised something was bugging me. Something about routine. But I wasn’t sure what it was.

I pondered over the last routine I’d gone through. Stop train, open doors, go get coat, turn key next to coat hook, grab bag, go get coffee…wait, that’s not what happened. That’s the standard routine but surely last time it went stop train, open doors, take coat from manager, grab bag, go get coffee? So…keys? Where are my train keys? Fuck!

Despite my manager maintaining that I’d definitely got my keys we got back to discover the train broadcasting an emergency alarm to the Controller. This is…unfortunate. And extremely embarrassing. I cancelled the alarm and shut down the train properly while I tried to figure out how the hell I managed to forget my key. It took me a while. Have you figured it out? Yes, I was thrown out of my routine by the assessing manager handing me my coat which meant I wasn’t near the key and forgot to turn it. So basically, I’d have passed that pesky assessment if I hadn’t been being assessed.

No, it’s ok, there’s too much paperwork involved for that level of irony. We agreed that it never happened. 😉

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This is stalking now, right?

Tags

mini adventure, not-trains, oddness, photography

Do we all remember how earlier this year I wrote about this guy?

Well he’s back with a vengeance and it seems he’s no longer so circumpsect. Lurking on a windowledge in the dead of night is clearly for amateurs. He’s now spying on me in broad daylight! This leaves me wondering what it is that I do that is so fascinating to pigeons.

The Sky Is Falling!

Tags

mini adventure, spad, srs bsns, train, tunnel, weather, yikes, zoom

Ah Autumn. What a wonderful season. Unless you’re a traindriver. Or a passenger. Or a trains manager or Signaller. Or in any way associated with or reliant on the railways. Then it’s sheer hell.

We are on our leaf fall timetable at present. For us that means we run the trains a few minutes early and will do so from early October until around December. Leaf fall is a bit of a problem on railways and every year we have to work around it in a variety of ways. Re-jigging the timetable is one and there are some practical things we can do in terms of maintenance of the rails and our land but the autumnal onslaught is something we struggle with every year. Basically it’s because leaves are bastards.

Leaves. Green things on sticks. Big sticks and ones with root systems but that’s what it boils down to. The problem is that they don’t stay there. Come the autumn they get flung off and blow about a bit. A fair quantity find their way onto railway tracks and at that point it’s a slippery slope to doom.

The thing we hate about leaves is the sap. As discarded leaves naturally rot down they release tree sap. This stuff is incredibly slick and sticky and when you are running a vehicle with metal wheels balanced on metal rails then that’s bad news. Every time the motors are applied the wheels have a tendency to spin uselessly for a bit before they can gain traction. Aside from the cumulative effect of many tiny delays caused by trains struggling to get started this causes damage to the wheels. This is bad enough but the issue is compounded because wheels which are damaged or flatted in one or more areas can in turn cause damage to the track. So not only do we have trains struggling to move and gradually accumulating bigger and bigger delays but we have both trains and tracks needing more than usual maintenance.

As ever, when there is a problem starting there is also a problem stopping. With slippery track it is incredibly simple to gently apply the brakes and have every wheel instantly lock up. The train then has the potential to slide along until friction eventually stops it. Naturally this will result in flatting of the wheels and again, that sort of damage is best avoided.

There are some solutions. We don’t have a perfect solution but we have a few things going on to give us a fighting chance in the annual battle with nature. The first thing we do is cut short turnaround times at termini. In plain english that means the train will leave a few minutes early. This allows the train to run slightly slower but to still arrive at major interchanges around the same time. By running more slowly it obviously takes less time to bring the train to a halt in stations so that drivers don’t need to brake so harshly. Another thing we do is change driving style. Braking starts much further out from a station and is much more gradual. Depending on the distance between stations I could start applying tiny amounts of brake from as far out as halfway whereas normally I’d not even think about it until I was a trainslength or so outside.

This slow, measured approach is crucial to keeping things moving. It adds a little extra to each journey time but on balance it cuts down delays. By keeping speeds down and braking gently and early trains are less likely to overshoot or slide straight through stations. It also reduces the likelihood of a driver being horrified as they slide straight towards a red signal. If you read my previous entry on failed signals you’ll remember that when a signal is passed at danger (whether authorised or unauthorised) there is a procedure in place to maintain safety. And that this procedure takes quite a bit of time to complete. So accidentally flying through reds because the wheels are locked up is going to cause a huge delay (not to mention that the system instantly loses a driver as they are removed for interviews and investigation and if there is no spare around that means putting the train away too).

If you read that entry you’ll also remember that if we are in any way not sure what’s going on we have to default to the safest method of working. In the case of Signallers if they suddenly get a whole bunch of signals turning red for no apparent reason they have to assume it’s because a train entered that area – even if there are no other indications of a vehicle being there. I mention this because the little leafy demons are responsible for delays in another way. The buildup of sap and decaying leaves can disrupt the signalling – essentially it short circuits the signals and these go to danger. The Signaller is then obliged to run the system with a failed signal and that takes lots of time to process.

One thing we try to do is to keep trees cut back on our land. Ideally they’ll be no closer than a metre from the rails so that falling leaves will not go on the track. We have crews out for much of the year cutting back back large sections of foliage but it’s a sisyphean task. With large amounts of LUL track being outdoors it’s very difficult to strike a balance between maintaining wildlife habitat and keeping a working railway. And even though we cut back harshly, trees will have sprung up again within a few months. Even if we completely stripped our land of trees we’d still have leaves blowing in from other areas. So unless LUL can get a bylaw passed to institute treemageddon within the M25 boundary then we need to think up another means of dealing with leaf fall.

And we have one. Two, actually. One is to pressure wash the track. This is a tactic used by many companies which run on Network Rail track but with us being powered from the rails it’s obviously not ideal to run a train through dumping water everywhere. So instead we lay something called Sandite. This is a mixture of sand which provides better traction and an enzyme which helps disperse leaf sap. Sandite comes from hoppers on a small train which pours it directly onto the running rails. It is not a perfect solution and needs replacing at least once per day but it makes a big difference in how easy it is to get trains running properly.

Various train operating companies also have systems on trains which are designed to stop the wheels spinning uselessly and locking up. It rather depends on the age of the train and who designed it as to whether this works well or not. Some are ok, some are a bit pants. But every little thing that is done to counteract leaf fall can give us a tiny advantage.

I think this is a war we are never going to win. Most of the time we are victorious in the yearly battles with hopefully only a few casualties in terms of sliding trains. But leaves are never going to leave and it’s going to be at least another month before the Horror of Autumn is over. Just in time for the Horror of Winter with iced up power rails, frozen points and (you guessed it) sliding trains. It never rains but it pours.*

*If it rains we get slippery track and…. 😉

Lit Crit

Tags

mini adventure, train, truth, tube

Given how indisputably awesome I am, it may be surprising for you to learn that traindrivers are generally pretty rubbish at telling stories. I know, I know, it’s hard to imagine. But it’s completely true. The problem lies not in the storytelling skill of the driver but in a fairly limited range of material. Just how often can a person relate that they went to work, it got dark, it got light, it got dark, it got light, it got dark again before the audience wakes up and wanders off?

All that said, we do give it our best shot. Just this morning I was standing around waiting for dawn and chatting to another driver about this and that. And he told a story. Drivers are always telling stories of one sort or another. There is an incredible store of traindriver stories within LUL which pretty much dates back to when the lines were first built. And nothing is ever written down but passed on orally from one driving generation to the next. We’ve been around in one form or another for nearly 150 years and must have millions of different stories circulating. All of them unique except in one respect. They pretty much end in exactly the same way.

Take this morning’s story as an example. We had been talking about the wildlife to be found on the line. The story started well with an exposition on the types and number of fauna to be found on the railway which is phenomenal when you consider we work in a huge city. Today I saw a green woodpecker, rabbits, red kites, foxes, magpies, blackbirds, pigeons (but of course) and deer. And that’s just the things I can remember offhand. Today’s storyteller explained that the railway is not so much an urban environment but corridors of nature which intersect the city. Creatures live on the line but they also use it to travel from one place to another. And in the case of pigeons I mean that very literally with birds hopping on a train at one station and off at the next.

Framework laid, the story continued with a beautiful characterisation of some of the creatures we are lucky to observe about the place. The cheeky fox cubs who tumble down embankments, lazy rabbits dawdling along behind cable runs, darting magpies and aerobatic pigeons. We’re treading into Disney territory here but it’s all real life. In particular, the driver mentioned a beautiful deer he saw early one morning. A roe deer which tiptoed onto the line sometime just after dawn and stayed for a few days, gracefully wandering up and down the wild land beside the tracks.

Characterisation done, he moved on to the main part of the plot. The universal struggle of life. This deer is a little unusual for the railway as there’s usually not enough land for them to roam. Mostly we get the smaller muntjac deer which charge up and down embankments and leaping over boundary fences like malevolent goats. To get a roe deer visiting is a special event and it is likely that she entered the railway to gain a little peace and quiet for her fawn. It wasn’t very old but it could certainly roam up and down with her and the drivers saw them both in a variety of cute poses as trains zipped past. This story is really starting to rock and roll, isn’t it?

But in every story there must be a little tragedy and this one is no different. It happened that the doe wandered with her baby up the line to a fairly steep bank and got stuck. For her own reasons she didn’t want to walk back down the line and the bank was far too steep to easily climb. So she and the fawn stayed down on the railway and she ate what she could find. She kept trying to struggle up the bank but always returned to the track. I’m welling up a little just thinking about it.

But then, triumph! Every good story needs a happy victory. And the deer finally managed to scramble up to the top of the bank where she stood gazing out over the railway and the parkland beyond. In just a short time she’ll be running through the trees to be reunited with her herd. This story is great!

Well it would be. If it were not for the problem that pretty much all of our stories end up the same. It was a good story until the point that we need a conclusion. Nicely paced, interesting characters, good descriptions of the locality. We just need a decent ending for once. Let’s try it, shall we?

The deer looked back at the perilous climb she had just conquered, no doubt feeling a little proud of herself. As with most things, it’s easy if you know how and after doing it once she could run up and down that bank all day with no problems. But that was not her intention. Now that the fawn was old enough to move greater distances there was no need to shelter on the embankment and it was time to move on. There she stood in the early morning sun, waiting for her sweet baby to follow her route up the embankment. The young fawn gazed up at his mother standing in all her glory above him. Then he got hit by a train.

Something went bump in the night!

Tags

mini adventure, not-trains, oddness, photography

So I’m sitting here minding my own business and trying to work out how best to level up in Gardens of Time (I’m something of a sucker for facebook games) when I hear a strange sound. As I haven’t noticed any blue flashing lights it’s unlikely to be the police kicking in my door again (another story for another time) and I’m home alone so this is more than slightly freaky. Besides, it’s 2am. We all know that ethereal shit goes down at 2am. This cannot be good news.

The sound came from the window. So I did what any self-respecting person would do and stayed right here on the sofa while wondering if I dared go to peek. Before I could leap up and storm over there with only my lightning wit and my lethal bare hands as weapons (I totes would have!) I heard the noise again. This time accompanied by an inhuman face appearing over the edge of the windowsill. I’m on the second floor, my outside windowledge is two inches wide and there’s no way on earth that anyone can climb up there.

This guy must have magical powers. Like flying….

We stayed like that for quite a while. Me staring at him, him staring at me. Then I grabbed my camera because if it does turn out that he’s some sort of demonic force trying to lure me into letting him in then I want evidence to explain why my rotting corpse is bedecked with candles and feathers and strange symbols are daubed on the walls in human blood. Incontrovertible evidence that the fuzz cannot possibly miss the next time they kick my door in.

He has a strangely intense look on his…is ‘face’ the correct term? I can’t decide if that look is aimed at me or at the penguin. Or possibly at the fact my window clearly needs somebody to come along with a shammy (equally clearly, that person is not me). It’s a very pointed look. Maybe that’s the beak though. But either way, it’s quite a disconcerting look for a pigeon.

I pondered what to do to move our relationship forward. We needed to get past this initial stage of mutual suspicion and alarm. This is tricky as most of my experience with pigeons comes from running them over. A sudden thud and brief regret is probably not the best way to endear oneself to a species. Maybe that’s what the look is for. He’s been sent here by a cabal of pigeons to memorise my face so he can accurately describe me to the others. That way if they see me hurtling along they can flip and head in the other direction. I swear I don’t try to kill pigeons deliberately. I quite like them, in fact. But now and again their daring acrobatics in the face of an oncoming train just don’t pan out too well.

Eventually I hit on it: food! Animals like food, right? But what do pigeons eat? Everything! Obviously! I set my camera down and wandered through to the kitchen to see what was available. There I hit a snag. Does “everything” encompass cucumbers? Tomatoes? Somehow I can’t see a pigeon tucking into a tomato. I have some porridge but I am reluctant to waste tomorrow’s breakfast on what may yet be a demonic force. Then I remembered that I had stashed away the remains of an entirely legally acquired and fully paid for box of Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. Despite this being something of an anomaly for me I saw no reason that my new pigeon friend (hopefully) wouldn’t enjoy them. I grabbed a handful and headed back to the window. Only to discover that he’d vanished.

I opened the window and threw out the cereal anyway because the alternative was to stand around in my front room holding ancient cornflakes for the rest of the night. I’m happy to report that no demonic forces invaded and I was not attacked by hundreds of avian foe hellbent on feathery revenge. So why was he there? I have no clue. It’s a bit late for birds to be flying around and while he did seem incredibly interested in what I was doing, I don’t think the Met Police routinely employ surveillance pigeons. I’m also pretty sure he can’t be a Kellogg’s spy as he hasn’t come back for the evidence.

I’m going to take the chance that he was just a random pigeon doing weird stuff. But just in case he wasn’t, please listen carefully to the announcements tomorrow. If you happen to hear one about ‘lack of available staff’ then please assume the worst and direct the emergency services here. It’s ok, the police know where I live and how to get in.

Fried Potatoes, Whipped Chicken, and Bean Gravy

Tags

fail, irony - i duz it, mini adventure, not-trains, oddness, tube

It has recently come to my attention that I may be completely and utterly retarded. No, please don’t patronise me with cries of incredulity for I will not shift my position on this. The evidence is irrefutable.

I console myself that I am not alone in my plight as my particular brand of idiocy is one that is apparently shared among most Underground staff and indeed any contractors who might have the misfortune to work for us. What is our shared mental deficit? It is our collective inability to deal with anything above ground. We can’t do it. Can’t do what? Can’t do the whole thing. Upstairs. The surface. It’s weird.

For what you might term an Eloi, it’s not that strange to be wandering around on top of the earth. It’s no big deal. They occasionally pop down to travel somewhere and then nip back up to a perfectly normal life. I readily admit that the weirdness only happens when we go up there. And when Underground goes up top we do such weird spatial shit that M.C. Escher starts turning around in his grave.

One of the main areas where we routinely fuck things up is in moving between different levels. Lifts, stairs, escalators…you name it, we can’t do it. Take, for example, the lift which leads to the depot canteen. Outside the lift on the ground floor is – as you’d expect – a key to tell you what is on each floor. It goes something like this:

1 – Train Manager’s Office

2 – Canteen

3 – Staff Accomodation

4 – Station Manager’s Office

Do you see it? Do you see the problem? It’s the wrong bloody way around! We have paid a no doubt ginormous amount of money to have a lift key that is upsidedown! This is what I mean about passing on our insanity to the contractors who work for us. I sometimes sit late into the night rocking and whimpering and hoping that the contractors who put that one up were foreign, illiterate or just too frightened to tell us that our sign was every flavour of wrong. Lift keys just don’t work that way! And usually, we can get it right. Lifts underground are numbered perfectly sensibly. It’s just when we get to about sea level that we seem to panic and lose our heads.

Of course, that’s not the only instance. The whole idea of What’s Up There is a mystery to many of us. I don’t know why you people get on my train and go to the places you go to. I don’t know what happens to you after you exit to the platform and vanish from view. I sincerely hope it’s not too dreadful but for the love of all that is holy please do not try to engage me in conversation about What’s Up There. Sometimes innocent passengers ask drivers for directions to a building or a street or some similarly strange thing. They usually seem surprised that we don’t know and have never been up there. Requests for directions to the ticket barriers are usually met with a frightened look and a redirection to station staff. Requests for directions beyond station limits are met with a sudden dust storm and the sound of running feet.

I was musing on our collective problem the other day as I trudged up the steps to the ground floor. I can only assume that the higher altitude gives us the vapours. In fact, as I walked smartly down the stairs to the ground floor, I realised that there’s probably a PhD in all this somewhere. Take a group of people whose experience is largely inverse to that of the majority and then mess with their minds by turning the world all the wrong way around. Of course, you’d possibly need some sort of low-gravity environment in which to conduct experiments because anything else would be too brain-melting to think about. As I wandered up the three flights of stairs to the second floor I firmly resolved that I for one will not be the person to take on this research project.

On the way back down to the canteen I took the lift. A different canteen and a different lift. This time we have been clever and done away with a lift key. You either know where you are going or you don’t. It sort of works so long as you can remember which floor you are on and which button you should press. Very occasionally you will see somebody disappear into a lift and then there’s a pause and the lift doors open and there’s the same person with a surprised look on their face. Even more occasionally they don’t have the surprised look and just exit the lift as though they were expecting to be delivered there. I tend not to question those people.

I managed to hit the right button and amused myself on the journey down by staring at the floor. It was covered by a semi-transparent white mat which had some sort of writing on the other side in bold marker pen. As the lift went down I tried to decipher what was written. As it was effectively mirror script for me it took a while. ‘Please…please do not…please do not…use…this….’. The final word eluded me. Too many letters which could conceivably be other letters. Flit? Tile? Lite? As the lift arrived and the doors opened I finally cracked it: ‘Please do not use this lift’.

Keep Calm and Carry On

Tags

hrmmm, mini adventure, srs bsns, weirdness, yikes

I have ceased dancing in trains. OK, that’s an out and out lie, I admit it. I still dance. But lately you are more likely to see me hurtling past with a pensive look and a scant regard for braking distances. Other times you might see my train flying into a station with apparently no driver as I am doubled up with laughter. Or you might see me skidding round a bend in the track with a look of horror on my face. Though now that I think of it, that happens sometimes anyway. Seriously? Those shoes with THAT coat? And what the hell have you done to that poodle?!

At present my emotional rollercoaster ride is not caused by the fashion faux pas of the travelling public. It’s because a friend has started a new job. He is now our Emergency Planning Manager. This is a big responsibility and not as poggs queried, because he spends his day planning emergencies for us to have.

Or….is it?

I’ve found myself itching to email over a few queries about his new role. Such as, for example, what he plans to do if there’s a sudden zombie invasion? And what happens if somebody pulls the plug out of the Thames one day? Has he figured out how well a train floats? And is it really true that water will would surge up the Bakerloo and Northern lines as far as Paddington and King’s X respectively? What happens if somebody cocks up with a tunnel boring monster machine again as happened few years ago. What am I supposed to do if I suddenly encounter one of these in a tunnel? Are they like dentists’ drills and cut out when they encounter something soft like a traindriver? Or will they just keep going? And do we have contingency plans for moving around them? OH MY GOD! HOW DO I STEER??? HOW DO I STEER??????????? Suppose there’s an earthquake and we sink upside down and have to get out as the water rises until…oh wait, that’s The Poseiden Adventure.

As you can see, the role of emergency planning manager is no simple undertaking. Not least because the current incumbent has some friends with wild imaginations and too much time to spend daydreaming. But it seems that I am not the only person ever to have considered the emergencies we might find ourselves having. For SNCF have seen fit to warn their customers not to leave the train lest they be eaten by a scary dinosaur. You know what that means, don’t you? Somewhere in France there’s somebody dreaming up insane emergencies and I’m betting that their name is Retardes Graves.

Dance, dance, thud

Tags

joy, mini adventure, oddness, train, tube, tunnel, weirdness, yikes

It is entirely possible that you don’t need to read this entry. If you are the sort of person who can generally be relied upon to work out content from a title then you can save yourself some time and head off now. Mind you, even if you are not the sort of person who can generally be relied upon to work out content from a title then you probably can do so on this occasion. What I’m saying is, you don’t need to waste your time here because it’s pretty much self-explanatory. There was dancing. There was more dancing. Then there was a thud. At the time of the thud you’ll note the dancing was no longer happening. Then there’s nothing more after that. Really, you don’t need to read any further. Doing so will only increase my humiliation and embarrassment at the whole thing.

So now I’ll continue writing safe in the knowledge that nobody is reading. Sometimes it’s therapeutic to write, don’t you think? Oh, I forgot, there’s nobody there to answer. Well I sometimes find it therapeutic to write. Even if there’s nobody reading. Which there isn’t. But writing is good.

Something else I enjoy is dancing. It is entirely possible that I’m the only person in the cosmos who enjoys my dancing because I suspect I’m not all that good at it. It sometimes happens that I pretend to be a zombie. And other times I start dancing. Then I stop in shame and bewilderment that there is precious little difference between the two. But that’s not important here. What’s important is that I like doing it.

Sometimes I combine the things I like. Sometimes that works out well like shortbread and cream cheese. Sometimes it works out badly like fruit juice and toothpaste. But there are other times too. Times where it starts out fine and then all of a sudden goes badly wrong. Like coffee. Delicious coffee. Just the thing to wake up your bleary self in the morning until the point you absentmindedly select the wrong carton from the fridge and top it off with orange juice.

One such pairing which results in deferred-yet-inevitably-awful-= consequences is dancing while driving a train. It always seemed like such an innocently joyous behaviour. There’d I’d be, trundling along and I’d realise I was bored or sleepy or ecstatically happy or something. So I’d get up and dance for a bit. Life was so simple then.

The dancing wasn’t simple. The dancing was damn tricky but I would keep at it because it was so much fun. So I’d dance despite the complete lack of room and the fact I was on a moving vehicle traversing some incredibly rough track. Despite having to keep a sharp eye out for signals, stations and other trains because GOD FORBID that anybody should see me leaping about like a nutter while in charge of a train or that I’d have to accurately relate what the hell I was doing when I danced my way through a danger signal, onto adverse points and a derailment. Despite my complete inability to use one of my arms because I had to keep the deadman held down. There was no waving in the air like I just didn’t care because if I did that then the entire operation would come crashing to a rather unseemly halt. No, the dancing was not easy or even good but I perservered.

Until a few weeks ago. A few weeks ago I was entering a tunnel and decided to have a dance. Yay, it’s dark, nobody can see me and if anyone in the first car enquires I can pass off the arhythmic thuds of my feet hitting the floor as “train noises”. It’s not like drivers don’t sometimes jump up and down anyway…sometimes the incredibly rough track is an advantage because I’ll be there jumping up and down and all of a sudden the train lurches at just the right moment and I’m pogoing maniacally. Seriously good fun.

But this time it wasn’t so much fun. I was dancing away and somehow found myself to be on one leg. This was in no way intentional. It just sort of happened. Likely I wouldn’t even have registered that I’d been on one leg had the train not reached some rough track and taken a sharp lurch to the right. My unorthodox stance on driving trains led to my overbalancing and taking an equally sharp lurch to the left. I would just like to underline here how proud I am that in spite of my wildly flailing limbs I at no point let go of the deadman. No. I took it with me. As I fell to the left at an angle my right arm rose and with it came the handle to a great accompaniment of airloss and brake application. Happily this did not last long as I almost immediately collided with the cab window and bounced back upright.

Once I had collected my thoughts I set the train in motion again. Then tried to look casual as though I had meant to do that. Then remembered that I was alone in a dark cupboard. Then felt my face go red even though nobody had apparently noticed. There are very few occasions when a person is all alone and finds themselves blushing and in general I find it is best not to talk about them. Which is why I’m really glad you people are all the sort of people who can generally be relied upon to work out content from a title and read no further.

Talking Heads

Tags

easter eggs, mini adventure, not-trains, oddness, photography

As I finished work reasonably early today I decided to take a trip to the zoo with my camera. There’s a bus that runs from near Regents Park up to the zoo and being as I was at Warren St and it was about to start raining I decided to catch another bus along the road. So I lurked at the stop on Euston Road and took the first bus that came – this happened to be an 88 to Clapham Common.

Off we set westbound and presently came to a road just before Great Portland St Station. Here the bus peeled off to the left and headed behind the station as was expected. I figured I’d better get off at the next stop and dinged the bell. At this point I noticed this poster and guessed that clearly, somebody is not a morning person.

Then the bus took an unexpected turn and looped right to go around the other side of Great Portland St Station. As I tried to figure out where the bus stop was likely to be in this direction the bus once again turned right. We now headed along Euston Rd eastbound and despite me and another passenger ringing the bell again not stopping at the designated bus stop there.

Once we got to the junction with Tottenham Court Rd we cut right then left so as to run along the front of UCLH. Then right and right again to run along the back of UCLH. I suppose if you are going to do a job then do it thoroughly although I would just point out that letting the confused passengers off at some point is good for extra brownie points.

After that we turned right again and up Tottenham Court Road before swinging left for a change onto Euston Rd. By this time there was constant ringing of the bell and passengers shouting at the driver to let them off but he was a dedicated sort and had set his mind to driving his bus and nothing would budge him on this. We did briefly slow down as we sailed past the bus stop I’d originally got on at but presumably the driver didn’t want to stop there as he’d already done that one. Notwithstanding this impeccable logic I waited til he stopped in traffic and then used the emergency buttons to open the doors and exit. Several passengers leapt off after me and the bus zoomed off leaving us to ask one another what the hell that had been about.

After that I decided that the rain wasn’t too heavy and it’s a nice walk through Regents Park anyway. Zoo pics coming soon!