Wednesday 29 January 2014


Okay yesterday’s post was a complete disaster but I think I got it straight by the end.  Similarly the Central Line had a mare yesterday, we started off with a signal failure in the morning after which the trains started to suffer power problems.  An inspection found the cause, 38 “shoes” were found trackside.  For those who don’t know “shoes” are the things that pick up the electricity from the "juice" rails to power the trains and obviously they’re not much use when not attached to anything so finding 38 lying around is not good.

I first knew about the problem when I went to pick up my first train and found a train technician waiting to meet it.  The TOp I relieved told us that the train was sluggish going WB and positively snail-like EB, the TT had a quick check on the part of DTS TOps can’t access and declared that ON NO ACCOUNT SHOULD THE TRAIN ATTEMPT THE RETURN JOURNEY FROM WER.   Not only did he say it, he said it in bold and in Caps.

Going WB the train struggled to reach target speed and laboured up any incline.  When I finally reached WER there was a spare waiting to take the train into the depot and when I went to see the DTSM to ask what I was to do there were loads of WER TOps sat around for want of trains.  I ended up riding the cushions all the way back to LES on the next EB train and even ahead of the evening peak it was certainly noticeable that the platforms more crowded than usual.

When I went to pick up my second half there was still no explanation as to why so many shoes had become detached but hopefully they’ve sorted it out otherwise there might not be a train for me to drive.  The horror, the horror...........

No comments:

Post a Comment