Back from Annual Leave and straight into utter chaos. At BEG someone was “tired of London” and had jumped down on the track but rather than a train arriving at speed BTP arrived at a more leisurely pace down the escalators. Realising that his attempt to end it all by mass transit system had been thwarted he produced a knife and tried to disembowel himself, all rather messy according to the reports.

Meanwhile three scallywags purloined a car, failed to shake off their pursuers, abandoned the stolen vehicle at RED, fled into the station and then scurried off down the tunnel towards GAH. The police sent search parties up both the EB and WB tunnels to make sure they didn’t double back through a cross passage, successfully herded the miscreants up to GAH and into the clutches of the police waiting to take them into custody.

Our staffing problem has been solved with the arrival of loads of new TOps one of whom was about to start his “sweat day” as I was getting off my train this morning. Sweat Day is your first on your own, without an IOp or a manager on the train to monitor you, thus the expectancy of nervous perspiration. Mine was easy but by the time I got around to it I’d spent half my 16 weeks training learning how to drive the train and all the possible routes I could be asked to do but the latest lot only had 12 or 13 weeks in total, it seems that the 8 weeks I got have been halved in a bid to save time and money.

Reports are that this wasn’t particularly successful on the Piccadilly where a lot of new TOps had to be sent back for more training. Similarly on the Victoria Line the TOps there were only given 8 days training on the new 09 stock and I’m told that a lot of the problems suffered when these trains were being introduced were down to unfamiliarity with the new stock. I believe the phrase is “false economy”………