Another lovely day on the Central Line, another trip round the HAI-WOO loop with the door open enjoying the sunshine followed by a truly breathtaking sunset as I headed WB up to WER, all in all a good day to drive a train. I didn't get a shot of the sunset so here's one I took earlier this year of sunrise over Debden.



One piece of good news is that 27 trainees have started the TOp course and they are all coming to the Central Line. Just as well, we had 15 shifts uncovered at my depot yesterday and loads of trains cancelled, hopefully the Olympics might not be such a struggle after all.

I was told that the “one under” on Wednesday survived but then jumping in front of a train is not the best method of topping yourself. The generally accepted figure is that approximately one in three achieve the intended outcome, around the same number come away with a permanent injury while the other third come out relatively unscathed.

When a TOp is unfortunate enough to have a “one under” you aren’t be allowed back on a train for at least a month and when you are you will be accompanied by an IOp until management are convinced that you are okay to be left on your own. On rare occasions the TOp finds that they simply can't face driving a train and are re-employed elsewhere by the company.

A few year ago there was a rather unpleasant film called “Three and out” about a TOp who suffers two “one unders” in the space of a week and is told that if he had three within a month he would be retired with ten years’ salary in a lump sum. Utter garbage naturally, happily it bombed at the box office and the writers are enjoying the obscurity they so richly deserve.

What really annoyed us at the time was that LUL allowed the production team to film on the trains and stations in the first place, you would have thought that they would have taken a look at the script and seen that it would upset the staff. Sadly I suspect that the idea of being connected with any sort of media event got them so hot and bothered that they lost all sense of perspective, if they had any to start with.

I guess things look very different from the lofty towers of 55 Broadway.